Arlington National Cemetery

Arlington House and the roughly 1,100 acres surrounding it belonged to George Washington Parke Custis, Martha Washington's grandson, who passed it to his daughter Mary Anna Custis — the wife of Robert E. Lee. When Lee resigned his U.S. Army commission in 1861 to join the Confederacy, the family fled the estate, and federal troops occupied it almost immediately for its commanding view of the capital. In May 1864, with Union casualties from the Overland Campaign overwhelming existing cemeteries, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs — who despised Lee personally and blamed him for the war's carnage — ordered soldiers buried directly around the mansion and in Mrs. Lee's rose garden, a deliberate act meant to make the estate uninhabitable for the family that had owned it.

The Lee family never accepted the seizure as legal, and after Robert E. Lee's death his son, George Washington Custis Lee, sued to reclaim the property on the grounds that it had been taken without the legal process the Constitution required for unpaid taxes. The case reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in the family's favor in 1882: the seizure had indeed been illegal. Rather than exhume thousands of Union dead, Congress purchased the estate outright from the Lee heirs for $150,000 in 1883, ending the dispute and formally establishing federal ownership of what had already become the nation's most significant military cemetery.

Arlington has since grown to more than 600 acres and over 400,000 graves, the resting place of veterans from the Civil War through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, dedicated in 1921 to honor unidentified World War I dead, has been guarded around the clock by soldiers of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment since 1937, in any weather, without interruption. President John F. Kennedy is buried on a hillside below Arlington House, marked by an eternal flame his widow asked for after his 1963 assassination — a resting place within sight of the mansion his own ancestor by marriage once called home.