Your Sacrifice Will Always be Remembered Traditional Geocache
KeokukDiscer: This one keeps disappearing. I've placed 3 new caches and when I check if they are there, they are gone, so it is sad too do, but I'm archiving this one.
Your Sacrifice Will Always be Remembered
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This cache is at the entrance to Keokuk National Cemetery.
Because of its location at the confluence of the Des Moines and Mississippi rivers Keokuk became a transportation hub for assembling Union forces during the Civil War. Thousands of these soldiers would return from Southern battlefields to Keokuk as casualties, either having been wounded or contracting an illness, to be cared for at one of the five military hospitals that were eventually located in Keokuk. The decision to located these hospitals in Keokuk was due to the presence of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the ability of the Union Army to transport the casualties up the Mississippi River.
The Keokuk National Cemetery was one of fourteen national cemeteries to be authorized by the U.S. Congress in an act of July 17, 1862 whereby President Lincoln was authorized "to purchase cemetery grounds... to be used as a National Cemetery for soldiers who shall have died in the service of their country." Most of these cemeteries, like Keokuk, were not battlefield sites but as a general rule located within properties owned by cemetery associations at sites where troops were mobilized and where hospitals were located.
The Keokuk National Cemetery is located on 22.7 acres of land that was part of Oakland Cemetery and donated by the City of Keokuk in 1862. By the end of the war there were 635 interments in the Keokuk National Cemetery: 600 known Union soldiers, 27 unknown soldiers, and the remains of 8 Confederate soldiers who died in Keokuk as prisoners of war. The cemetery is currently the final resting place for the remains of over 4,000 American soldiers from all of the conflicts that have occurred since the Civil War
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