On May 13, 1864, the first military interment occurred on the grounds of Arlington House. The mansion and the surrounding 200 acres were established as Arlington National Cemetery in the next month. Located on the Potomac River opposite Washington, D.C., the cemetery now includes the graves of soldiers from every war in which the United States has participated, including the American Revolution.

Arlington House was built in 1802 by George Washington Parke Custis, step-grandson and adopted son of George Washington. In 1831, Custis’s daughter, Mary Anna married Lieutenant Robert E. Lee in the main hall of the mansion. The couple resided there until 1861, when Lee took command of Confederate troops in the Civil War. After Lee’s departure, the Union Army transformed Arlington House, also called the Custis-Lee Mansion, into a military headquarters and the grounds into a camp. In 1864, the estate was declared a military cemetery by order of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

Lee’s eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, challenged the government’s assumption of the property for years, eventually securing $150,000 in compensation. In 1925, the U.S. War Department began restoring Arlington House to its pre-war condition. Today, it is maintained by the National Park Service as a memorial to Robert E. Lee.

More than 400,000 active duty service members, veterans and their family members are buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Memorial Day is honored at Arlington National Cemetery by the placing of a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The President of the United States generally does the honors on Memorial Day and Veterans Day; wreath-laying ceremonies are also held for other occasions. This tomb, with its white marble sarcophagus, rests above the grave holding the remains of an unknown serviceman from World War I. West of the crypt for the World War I unknown are three other crypts: one holds an unknown from World War II; another holds an unknown from the Korean War. A third crypt, now empty, once held an unknown serviceman from Vietnam who was later identified after DNA testing. Other memorials at the cemetery include the mast of the U.S.S. Maine, a monument to Robert Peary, and the graves of John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and many other notable people.

On May 13, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt delivered the opening address, “Conservation as a National Duty,” at the outset of a three-day meeting billed as the Governors’ Conference on the Conservation of Natural Resources. He explained to the attendees that “the occasion for the meeting lies in the fact that the natural resources of our country are in danger of exhaustion if we permit the old wasteful methods of exploiting them longer to continue.” The conference propelled conservation issues into the forefront of public consciousness and stimulated a large number of private and state-level conservation initiatives.

One distinguishing characteristic of really civilized men is foresight…if we do not exercise that foresight, dark will be the future!

Opening Address By the President. President Theodore Roosevelt. In Proceedings of a Conference of Governors. In the White House, May 13-15, 1908. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909. The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920

The gathering of the nation’s governors was spearheaded by Chief Forester of the United States Gifford Pinchot, with the assistance of Secretary of the Inland Waterways Commission William John “WJ” McGee. No individual was so completely and prominently identified with the American conservation movement in this era as Gifford Pinchot, who made it his mission to establish the permanently sustainable use of the nation’s natural resources on a foundation of rational and integrated public ownership and management.

Born in 1865, Pinchot was inspired at a young age by his father’s suggestion that he should dedicate his life to the profession of forestry, then all but unknown in the United States. Pinchot graduated from Yale and went to France and Germany to pursue his education as a forester. When he returned to the United States, another notable conservationist and friend of his father, Frederick Law Olmsted, encouraged him to work in North Carolina managing the forest at George W. Vanderbilt’s Biltmore estate near Asheville. In 1898, he became chief of the Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture, and in 1905 he succeeded in having the recently created forest reserves (later renamed national forests) transferred from the Department of the Interior to his own under what is now the Forest Service.

At the turn of the century, the nation’s newly created Forest Reserves were in the Department of the Interior. The General Land Office—at that time soaked with fraud and incompetence—had responsibility for administering them. Meanwhile, what few foresters existed worked in the Division of Forestry, located in the Department of Agriculture. When Gifford Pinchot took over the tiny Division of eleven people in 1898, he resolved to bring forests and foresters together into what many then considered the more efficient and ethical Department of Agriculture.

The U.S.D.A. Forest Service, Pinchot Institute for Conservation External

Pinchot became a good friend and advisor of President Roosevelt, who shared his views on conservation. He served on several of Roosevelt’s commissions, and together they organized the Governors’ Conference on the Conservation of Natural Resources. This conference was a seminal event in the history of conservationism; it brought the issue to public attention in a highly visible way. The next year saw two outgrowths of the conference: the National Conservation Commission, which Roosevelt and Pinchot set up with representatives from the states and federal agencies, and the First National Conservation Congress, which Pinchot led as an assembly of private conservation interests.

The practical approach to conservation as the sustainable husbanding of natural resources espoused by Pinchot and Roosevelt became a permanent element of national policy under their leadership and has decisively shaped the nation’s management of its environmental inheritance ever since.