Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier

Help Request that a Military Guard be Posted

As we celebrate Memorial Day in May, we honor the men and women who have died while in military service to our country. The earliest are Revolutionary War soldiers, remembered at a memorial in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier stands in Washington Square as part of a memorial that also honors George Washington.

For most of the 1700s, the square was used as a cemetery, first as a potter's field and then as the site of mass graves for thousands of soldiers killed during the Revolutionary War. Some died of war wounds, others from disease and starvation, including many held in the nearby Walnut Street jail in squalid, inhumane conditions during the British occupation of Philadelphia in 1777.

After the war, the square was used again as a mass grave, for victims of a Yellow Fever epidemic. Eventually, the city began a project to beautify the square, but it wasn't until the mid-1950s that the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier was erected. Inside the tomb, one 20-year-old male soldier, located in 1956 by archaeologists, has been interred. An eternal flame burns nearby to honor all of the fallen.

The tomb lacks the same kind of honor guard that patrols the better-known one in Arlington National Cemetery. Educators and students who want to participate in a campaign, requesting that a military guard be posted at the tomb, may write to Dr. Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense, 1000 Defense Pentagon, Washington, D.C., 20301-1000.