Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery
Reno, Washoe County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Grand Army Of The Republic Cemetery. In 1890 General OM. Mitchel Post 69, Grand Army of the Republic, bought 17 lots in the original Hillside Cemetery for the last resting place for comrades-in arms during the Civil War, 1861-1865.While Friends and relatives of the soldiers maintained the cemetery well, years of neglect and vandalism followed in the twentieth century. Restoration began in 1963 by the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War and other interested citizens of the Reno area.Among those buried here are members of the Nevada volunteers who served in their own state and neighboring areas of the West from 1861 -1866.
Erected by Eva M. Crist Mccarthy
The Story
In 1890 the General O.M. Mitchel Post 69 of the Grand Army of the Republic — the great fraternal organization of Union veterans — bought seventeen lots in Reno's Hillside Cemetery as a final resting place for its Civil War comrades. Among those buried here are Nevada volunteers who served across their own state and the neighboring West from 1861 to 1866. After decades of neglect and vandalism, the Daughters of Union Veterans and local citizens began restoring the plot in 1963.
Why it matters
The cemetery is a tangible reminder that the Civil War reached even the remote Far West, and that Nevada's Union volunteers took their place among the generation that preserved the nation.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When the Civil War came in 1861, it is easy to picture it as a struggle confined to the East — Virginia fields and border-state rivers. But the Union stretched to the Pacific, and the Far West raised its own men to hold it. Nevada, still raw frontier and newly vital for its silver, sent volunteers who served across their own territory and neighboring lands from 1861 into 1866.
These Western soldiers rarely faced the great set-piece battles of the East. Their war was one of long distances — guarding mail routes, overland trails, and telegraph lines, and keeping open the roads that tied the region to the rest of the country. It was essential, unglamorous service in a vast and thinly settled land.
By the time this cemetery plot was set aside, those men were aging veterans in a rapidly changing West, and the war they had fought was passing out of living memory and into history.
People & events
In 1890, the General O.M. Mitchel Post 69 of the Grand Army of the Republic purchased seventeen lots in Reno's original Hillside Cemetery. The Grand Army of the Republic was the great fraternal order of Union veterans, and across the country its local posts did exactly this — securing dignified ground where comrades-in-arms could rest together. The choice of a single shared plot was itself a statement: the bond formed in wartime was meant to hold in death.
Among those laid here are members of the Nevada volunteers, men who had served their own state and the surrounding West during the war years. For a time, friends and relatives kept the graves well.
Then the twentieth century did what time does to old memorials. As the veterans and their families passed, the plot fell into neglect and suffered vandalism. Its rescue came in 1963, when the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, joined by other Reno-area citizens, began the work of restoration — a second act of remembrance carried out by descendants and neighbors long after the last veteran was gone.
Its place in the American story
This modest plot testifies that the Civil War reached the whole nation, not just its eastern heartland. Nevada's Union volunteers took their place among the generation that fought to preserve the country, and their graves in Reno are proof that the war's stakes and its service extended clear to the Far West.
The cemetery also embodies a pattern repeated in thousands of American towns: veterans organizing to honor their own, a period of forgetting, and then a later generation choosing to remember again. The Grand Army of the Republic's founding of the plot and the Daughters of Union Veterans' 1963 restoration are two links in a long chain of deliberate remembrance.
In that sense the site is about memory itself — how a community decides which of its dead will not be forgotten, and returns, generations later, to make good on the promise.
If you visit
This is a quiet, contemplative stop rather than a grand monument, and that is its power. Walk the rows and read the names of men who came west and served in a war whose main battlefields lay thousands of miles away. Each stone is a small correction to the idea that the Civil War happened only "back East."
Notice the care of the restoration — the plot you see is the result of citizens in the 1960s refusing to let these graves disappear. That layer of the story, the rescuing as much as the burying, is part of what you are visiting.
It fits naturally into a day of exploring Reno's older history. Give it a few unhurried minutes; a place like this asks for attention more than time, and rewards visitors who come knowing what these veterans represented.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related events
- · American Civil War
Themes & tags
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