A small group of local historians got to be the first people to get a look at the future of Poplar Grove National Cemetery this past Saturday.

DINWIDDIE — A small group of local historians became the first people to get a look at the future of Poplar Grove National Cemetery this past Saturday.

The 8-acre Civil War cemetery, tucked away in a secluded corner of Dinwiddie County, is undergoing the most drastic renovations done at the cemetery since the 1930s, largely focused on replacing the weathered, flat headstones, with new upright headstones. According to Betsy Dinger, park ranger at Petersburg National Battlefield Park, who led the tour, this change has been a very long time coming.

“Back in 1933, the superintendent of the Park Service decided it would be much easier maintenance to cut off the headstones, lay them down flat, thinking that it would make both mowing the grass and keeping the tombstones maintained easier,” said Dinger. “It didn’t quite work out that way. Not only did it result in many of the headstones eroding beyond recognition far faster than they would have otherwise, but a few winters shifted them around in the ground enough to make moving over them impossible.”

In addition to replacing the tombstones, work is being done to install a flagpole, repair the brick enclosure wall that surrounds the cemetery, and turn the former caretaker’s cabin into a visitor’s center and park offices.

Dinger said that the project is hoped to be completed so the cemetery can reopen by December, if the weather permits.The steady rain over the past two months has caused some setbacks, but Dinger had nothing but praise for the men working on the renovations, many of whom were there working on Saturday to get the project back on schedule.

“A lot of the contractors working on the project are veterans themselves,” said Dinger. “To watch the care they show for this work, the see that sense of continuity from one generation of soldiers preserving the memory of another, it’s just incredible.”

The cemetery serves as the final resting place for 6,181 Union soldiers, two thirds or which are buried in unmarked or unknown graves. There are also members of the United States Colored Troops, soldiers who died fighting in the Philippines and World War I, and one British soldier who died of Spanish Flu at Fort Lee in World War I buried at the cemetery.

Poplar Grove is one of four parts of the Petersburg National Battlefield, which is a National Park Service unit preserving the battlefield and its landmarks. It’s one of 14 national cemeteries managed by the National Park Service. The national cemetery was established by the Federal Government in 1866 and the last burials were three unknown Union soldiers in 2003 on Memorial Day.

Since then, little has been done to the physical landscape of the cemetery until the recent renovations. Poplar Grove has been working for years to get funding for the renovations and the project was finally made possible due to a partnership between the National Park Service and the National Cemetery Administration. The National Cemetery Administration will be supplying all of the veterans’ headstones for the renovation, priced around $4 million. As Dinger points out, for the families of the men buried at Poplar Grove, no price is too much, as many had been pushing for the stones to be replaced for decades.

“Their families are just over the moon about this, one of the nicest things told to me by one of them was that these soldiers are going to greet you at the gates of heaven for what we’ve done here,” said Dinger. “Every man here had a story, they had families, they had dreams and goals, and their lives ended dying for this country in Petersburg, and we need to do everything we can to preserve their memories.”

• Sean CW Korsgaard may be reached at skorsgaard@progress-index.com, or at (804) 722-5172.