WisDOT says veterans graves won’t be moved during I-94 expansion

By ADAM KELNHOFER

Special to The Daily Reporter

Veterans from the Civil War and more buried alongside I-94 near the Brewers stadium won’t be moved from their final resting places as the freeway expands.

Milwaukee’s east-west interstate that bisects Wood National Cemetery has long been a source of contention due to its proximity to the final resting place for over 39,000 veterans and family members from every war and conflict the United States has fought in, except the Revolutionary War. That includes one headstone of a soldier who fought in the War of 1812. Several proposals to hasten travel along the freeway have failed, but the latest plan, already under construction, to add a lane found a way to keep the cemetery intact.

“There is no impact to graves or cemeteries,” Wisconsin Department of Transportation Communications Manager Dan Sellers said.

The new plan requires the freeway to be slightly narrowed between General Mitchell Boulevard and Hawley Road to give space to the cemetery, which is designated a National Historic Landmark.

Lanes will go from 12 feet to 11 feet for about 1,400 feet as drivers cruise through the area, and the DOT isn’t worried about the narrower lanes restricting traffic flow.

“At freeway speed, it will take about 17 seconds to drive though the transition area,” Sellers said. “At the narrowest point, where the lanes are 11 feet wide, driving through will be instantaneous. There are currently much longer sections of 11-foot lanes in the corridor, and they are performing well.”

That’s good news for people like Laura Rinaldi, a longtime advocate for preserving and restoring the cemetery and everything else on the grounds of the Milwaukee Soldiers Home, which is the second of the original three soldiers’ homes dedicated after the Civil War to help recovering veterans.

Rinaldi, who previously worked for 47 years at the Clement J. Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center on the Soldiers Home grounds, now volunteers as a tour guide for the Milwaukee Preservation Alliance. She’s a wealth of knowledge on the cemetery, Soldiers Home and everything else on the grounds.

“They don’t deserve to be moved,” she said of the graves. “This is supposed to be eternal rest, so they got to figure something else out. You’ve got cemeteries, and you’ve got the Jewish cemetery here, Calvary’s there, and the most important one is right here [Wood National Cemetery]. And those men deserve to be laid to rest.”

Rinaldi is not affiliated with the VA, and the department did not respond to a request for comment on the freeway expansion project.

The Soldiers Home, opened in May of 1867 after former President Abraham Lincoln approved legislation to establish the nation’s first three rehabilitation facilities for volunteer soldiers, who were left out of existing care facilities designated for regular Army veterans at the time. But even before Lincoln’s decision in 1865, a group of Milwaukee-area women raised roughly $100,000 and secured a state charter to construct a building to care for volunteers.

There have been many public outcries when it comes to potentially moving graves at the cemetery, so many that Rinaldi couldn’t recall exactly when the last was, but many graves have already been moved, she said.

The DOT specifically crafted the latest interstate expansion plan to leave the cemetery untouched, Sellers said.

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, there are only a few ways to disinter, or dig up, graves at national cemeteries. Disinterment can only be done if all living immediate family members give written consent, or through a court order “or state instrumentality of competent jurisdiction directs the disinterment.”

At Wood, that would likely mean moving graves of those who served in the Civil War, Spanish American War, both World Wars and more. Just a few yards from the fence erected alongside the south side of the freeway during construction lies one of five Civil War Medal of Honor recipients at the cemetery. Legendary Brewers broadcaster Bob Uecker isn’t buried far away either.

Some headstones near the freeway are so old and weathered that they’re illegible now. The VA has placed small information placards next to those stones, marking them for replacement.

Also, near the south shoulder of the freeway lay a former general of the Soldiers Home, several physicians, nurses and other staff under private headstones separated from the others.

To add to the complexity of construction projects near the cemetery, Soldiers Home Reef, first discovered in the 1830s by Increase Lapham and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993, lies beneath the Soldiers Home grounds and just outside the Brewers stadium. The 400-some-million-year-old formation is one of the first fossilized reefs discovered in North America, according to a pair of geologists who applied for the reef’s landmark designation.

The Soldiers Home complex itself was designated a national historic landmark in 2011, after a thorough study “determined that Milwaukee was the most intact of the three [original] homes,” Rinaldi said.

“The ladies, we did the ladies proud,” Rinaldi said, referring to the women who originally raised money to care for Wisconsin Civil War volunteers. “Because they knew it would have crumbled under their care. It almost crumbled under the federal care.”