Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery
Ridgetop military burial ground of exacting white headstone rows overlooking a bay, graded by Depression-era relief laborers.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego follows the Works Progress Administration crews Franklin Roosevelt sent up this ridge during the Great Depression, men with no other work who graded the slopes, laid the roads, and shaped rows for headstones rather than building anything people would use. It traces the site back to the eighteen seventies, when soldiers from the San Diego Barracks first began burying their own on an eight-acre plot here, long before the New Deal crews arrived. Look at how precisely the rows curve with the slope instead of cutting against it, and consider what that exactness meant to the men who dug it for a few dollars a week.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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