History
Congress authorized construction of the facility in 1937, with the first interments in 1941. The cemetery was officially dedicated on Memorial Day, May 30, 1942. California Attorney General Earl Warren (later Governor of California and Chief Justice of the United States) was keynote speaker at the ceremony. Golden Gate is one of a large number of U.S. Army-planned cemeteries started in the 1930s and completed during the 1940s. They were designed specifically to provide abundant burial opportunities in locations around the nation in cities with very large veteran populations.
As of 2005, the cemetery held 137,435 interments. Over the years, several attempts to expand Golden Gate National Cemetery were met with resistance from local residents, so it has remained at its original 161.5 acres (65.4 ha) since 1941.
Ironically, a number of service members who are buried at the Golden Gate National Cemetery were interned in the stables at the nearby Tanforan Racetrack during the early part of the Japanese American internment.
Read more about this topic: Golden Gate National Cemetery
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“History takes time.... History makes memory.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–c. 120)