James Parks was born into slavery in 1843 on the property of Arlington House. At the time, the Virginia estate was owned by George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of Martha Custis Washington through her first husband.
Parks was 18 when the Civil War began in 1861. Until that year, the house was occupied by Custis’s daughter, Mary Anna Custis Lee, and her husband, Robert E. Lee. Despite his lengthy U.S. military career, Lee decided to join his home state of Virginia after it seceded from the Union, later taking command of the Army of Northern Virginia, the main Confederate force.
In 1862, James Parks was set free in accordance with George Washington Parke Custis’ will, which stipulated that his 200 slaves would be freed within five years of his death. For the next 25 years, Parks lived in Freedman’s Village, a community for former slaves established by the federal government on the estate grounds. During the Civil War, Parks helped construct Fort Whipple, which is present-day Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall. In 1864, after Union forces authorized the use of 200 acres of the property for a military cemetery, Parks became a gravedigger and cemetery caretaker.
James Parks worked at Arlington Cemetery until 1925, the same year Congress voted to restore Arlington House (also known as the Custis-Lee Mansion) to how it had looked in 1861 when the Lee family vacated it. Parks was credited with giving detailed accounts of the “locations for the wells, springs, slave quarters, slave cemetery, dance pavilion, old roads, icehouse, blacksmith shop, and kitchens,” according to the National Park Service. Parks recounted that his parents and grandparents were buried in the slave cemetery, which was uprooted to make way for a farming area. It is not known what happened to the interred bodies.
After James Parks died in 1929 at age 86, Secretary of War James William Good granted special permission for Parks to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. Parks’ headstone is marked with a plaque donated by the American Legion, honoring his long service to America’s largest military cemetery. He is thought to be the only person buried at Arlington National Cemetery who was born on the property.
All about Arlington:
- Other notable individuals buried at Arlington National Cemetery include President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, President William H. Taft, boxer Joe Louis, astronaut and politician John Glenn, Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall, the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger, and jazz musician Glenn Miller.
- Arlington National Cemetery is also home to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which contains the remains of unidentified servicemen killed in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. The Vietnam War’s unknown soldier, Air Force officer Michael Blassie, was identified and reinterred near his home in Missouri in 1998.
- The original 200-acre cemetery has grown to 639 acres and contains the graves of approximately 400,000 veterans and their eligible dependents. Up to 30 funerals take place there every day.
- Until 1948, when President Harry S. Truman desegregated the U.S. military, graves at Arlington National Cemetery were also segregated. Section 13 was the primary burial ground for white Civil War soldiers, while Section 27 was the primary burial ground for African-American soldiers.
- The first “Decoration Day,” now observed as Memorial Day, was held at Arlington National Cemetery on May 30, 1868.
