The Veterans Administration prepared an Environmental Assessment for the Sarasota VA National Cemetery site in December 2004. In April 2007, the Department of Veterans Affairs purchased the site.

Construction of Phase I (2009 - 2010), which will consist of nearly 60-acres, will include facilities necessary to maintain, operate, and provide burials for approximately ten years. When this phase of construction is complete the interment areas will provide for nearly 18,200 full casket gravesites.

This beautiful cemetery will also include an administration and public information center complex with an electronic gravesite locator and public restrooms, a maintenance facility, a cemetery entrance area, a flag assembly area and a memorial walkway.

Congress provided the legal sanction for creation of a national cemeterial system by authorizing President Lincoln in the Act of July 17, 1862, "to purchase cemetery grounds ... to be used as a national cemetery for soldiers who shall have died in the service of the country."

Within 15 years following the termination of the Civil War in America, the War Department had created a national cemeterial system.

Meanwhile, in 1898, the United States went to war with Spain and sent three expeditionary forces beyond the seas, one to Cuba, another to Puerto Rico and a third, with reinforcing contingents, to the Philippine Islands. In 1900 an elite force of regulars sailed from Manila to join the Allied column that marched to the relief of the beleaguered legations in Peiping.

The decision to bring back to their homeland the dead of these far-flung battlefronts, marks a new era in the history of American burial policy.

The Sarasota National Cemetery is located at 9810 State Hwy 72. Sarasota.
Phone: (941) 922-7200
Toll free: (877) 861-9840
Fax: (941) 922-3457
Office Hours: Monday thru Friday 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Closed Federal holidays.
Visitation Hours: Open daily from sunrise to sunset.
Directions: Take Interstate 75 to exit 205 (Clark Road), travel East four miles (toward Myakka River State Park), cemetery site is on the right.

Credit: National Cemetery System Historical Information - Edward Steere - Quartermaster Review, September - October 1953 - Growth of the National Cemetery System.