Knoxville National Cemetery - Useful information

by Deb McKay
(Knoxville, TN)

Medal of Honor Recipient Timothy Spillane

Knoxville National Cemetery
939 Tyson Street, NW
Knoxville, TN 37917

Burial Space: This cemetery has space available for cremated remains. We may be able to accommodate casketed remains in the same gravesite of previously interred family members.

Acreage: 9.8

Number of Interments
Thru Fiscal Year 2006: 8,985

General Information Kiosk on Site? No

Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside established the cemetery during the Civil War after the siege of Knoxville and subsequent Battle of Fort Sander.
Capt. E.B. Chamberlain, the assistant quartermaster, was assigned the task of designing the national cemetery at Knoxville. The first interments were remains exhumed from Cumberland Gap, Concord and many other regional sites. Chamberlain’s design and system for recording interments was so effective that, in 1866, Gen. E.G. Whitman, observed that the cemetery had been “the only burial ground of Union soldiers…originally laid out and conducted to the present time in a manner and on a system that rendered it suitable to be converted into a national cemetery without material alteration or change, or removal of a single body.”
Knoxville National Cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.

Medal of Honor Recipient Sergeant Troy A. McGill, (World War II) U.S. Army, Troop G, 5th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division. Los Negros Islands, Admiralty Group, March 4, 1944. Sergeant McGill was returned to the U.S. from the Air Force Mausoleum Manila #1, Philippine Island and interred at Knoxville on Jan. 25, 1951.