Arlington National Cemetery grew around the mansion on the hill above you, the home Robert E. Lee left when Virginia seceded in April 1861.
The estate originally belonged to the Custis family. Mary Anna Randolph Custis, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, married Robert E. Lee in 1831 in the mansion on the hill. When Virginia seceded in April 1861, Lee resigned his commission in the United States Army and accepted command of Confederate forces. Federal troops occupied the estate almost immediately. In 1862, the family failed to pay a property tax in person — Mrs. Lee sent a cousin, who was refused — and the government confiscated the land.
By 1864, Union dead were being buried around the mansion's rose garden. Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, who despised Lee personally, ordered burials placed near the house specifically so that Lee could never return to live there. Over the course of the Civil War, sixteen thousand soldiers were buried here.
Today more than four hundred thousand people are buried in Arlington — soldiers, veterans, astronauts, politicians, and presidents. John F. Kennedy lies beneath an eternal flame, along with his wife Jacqueline and two of their children who died in infancy. Robert F. Kennedy is buried nearby.
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier holds the remains of unidentified American service members from World War One, World War Two, Korea, and formerly Vietnam. It is guarded twenty-four hours a day, every day, in all weather, by soldiers who take an oath of personal devotion to the unknown dead.