Abstract
The United States has a long history of veterans’ burial practices, epitomized by the guarantee of a permanent final resting place for all veterans to be maintained in perpetuity via the National Cemetery System. Prior to the establishment of this centralized burial system and the tradition of guaranteeing a resting place during the Civil War, servicemembers and civilians at outposts and naval bases would be buried in post cemeteries at the site of their service. Many of these relatively small cemeteries faced abandonment and disrepair as their associated bases closed. Such was the case with the Mare Island Naval Cemetery on the site of the former Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, California. This thesis will explain how the Mare Island Naval Cemetery has been preserved, from its closure in 1921 to its transfer from the City of Vallejo to the National Cemetery Administration in 2023. The Navy's decisions regarding maintenance of the cemetery and the efforts of community stakeholders to have the cemetery adopted into the National Cemetery System after the shipyard closed demonstrate the importance of community investment in the preservation of historic sites. The long and occasionally contentious story of the Mare Island Naval Cemetery's preservation shows the gaps through which atypical historic sites can fall in the web of national, state, and local mechanisms that constitute the institution of historic preservation in the United States.