A search for more burial space for military veterans in Southeast Tennessee that has spanned more than 40 years and at least three 3rd District House members ended Tuesday with the announcement of the expansion of the Chattanooga National Cemetery to a lakefront site in Meigs County.
The 270-acre site — more than double the current 120-acre cemetery — is near the point where Meigs, Hamilton and Rhea counties meet and should be easily accessible from Interstate 75 and state Highway 60. The land overlooks Lake Chickamauga and is near the juncture of the Tennessee and Hiwassee rivers.
The Chattanooga National Cemetery has been running out of space for years, but various measures have extended its life into the 2030s.
“For decades, Chattanooga’s veteran community has been rightfully sounding the alarm that the Chattanooga National Cemetery is rapidly running out of space,” U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann said in a statement Tuesday. “In fact, in less than a decade, the current cemetery will be fully at capacity, and there will be no more room for burials — this is why expanding Chattanooga’s National Cemetery is critically important to our veterans and their families.”
To give our veterans who sacrificed so much a final resting place is one aspect of their service military families shouldn’t have had to worry about.
But the local situation became worrisome to veterans in the early 2000s when cemetery officials said the expanse could afford burials only until 2015.
In 2007, five national cemeteries around the country were expected to close, and burials in three others were confined to cremated remains.
“We’re sending young men and women in harm’s way — and to lay their life on the line for us — and then we’re going to tell their families that when we inter them, you’ve got to go a long way off into another state to be buried,” then-U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Chattanooga, told the House Appropriations Committee, according to a news release. “That’s wrong. We need to address it.”
A year later, he pushed a House bill that required the Veterans Administration (VA) to undertake a feasibility study of expansion at the cemetery. The study found that expansion, only available to the south and covering only a relatively few acres, was projected to cost $6 million.
Instead of expansion, the cemetery extended its burial capabilities by using land that hadn’t previously been surveyed and readied for use, by adding in-place crypts for closer burials and by building a columbarium for cremated remains. Those changes pushed burial capabilities into the 2030s.
Even before Wamp, U.S. Rep. Marilyn Lloyd announced approval from the VA in 1978 and 1979, respectively, of the development of 10 acres and five acres of undeveloped cemetery ground. The 10 acres had previously been unused because it tended to flood.
The Veterans Administration paid $11.6 million for the Meigs County property, which was purchased from state Rep. Greg Vital, R-Harrison. Vital bought it from developers who had planned to use it for a golf course community before running into money and ownership troubles.
“This is probably the most spectacular waterfront property anywhere within a 30-minute drive of Chattanooga,” Vital said when he bought the property.
The Chattanooga National Cemetery and Mountain Home National Cemetery in upper East Tennessee are the only remaining national cemeteries in the state available for new burials. The Knoxville, Memphis and Nashville cemeteries closed for new burials around 30 years ago and now take only cremated remains or, in some cases, the loved one of someone already buried there.
The closest national cemetery to Chattanooga with remaining burial capability is the Georgia National Cemetery in Canton.
In 2020, the VA said it was seeking proposals for at least 150 acres within a 30-mile radius of downtown Chattanooga for another national cemetery.
“Once a site has been selected and funding has been authorized,” Lew Boone, director of corporate communications at the Department of Veterans Affairs said at the time, “the VA begins a design process that includes cemetery master planning, design development for the initial phase of cemetery construction and development of the site.”
The Chattanooga National Cemetery saw its first burial on Christmas Day of 1863 and to date has more than 50,000 interments, including the first Medal of Honor recipients from the Andrews Raiders during the Civil War, German prisoners of war from World War I and World War II, and more recent Medal of Honor recipients Charles Coolidge and Desmond Doss.
If that storied cemetery can’t be expanded, and it’s clear it is using what space it can, what’s planned for the beautiful land overlooking the lake — not too far from Chattanooga — sounds like an ideal resting place for those who have served the nation.