When volunteers placed U.S. flags at more than 130,000 gravesites this weekend at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery, they also saw thousands of neatly placed crypts dug into the 330-acre grounds. The third expansion project in the cemetery’s 102-year history is adding enough gravesites and columbarium niches for about 100,000 more veterans and eligible family members.
The ongoing construction adds 43 developed acres to the existing grounds, about a 15% increase, for more than 35,000 new in-ground lawn crypts for caskets or urns. It also adds more than 10,000 columbarium niches holding up to three urns each for cremated remains.
The new graves and above-ground columbaria will allow the Department of Veterans Affairs to meet expected burial needs in San Antonio for the next 30 years, according to Graham Wright, the cemetery’s acting director.
Because Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston and its national cemetery are essentially landlocked, using lawn crypts with two caskets stacked on top of each other expands capacity within the existing acreage. The new crypts will eventually be covered with dirt and grass before the project is finished.
Contractors broke ground in April 2022 for the $55 million project, which also includes improving roads, parking areas, utilities and security systems, and renovating the administration building, public information center and other support facilities. Crews are also erecting a new building for the Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery Memorial Service Detachment, a group of volunteers who perform military funeral honors when requested by families.
The entire project is scheduled to be completed in summer 2025. Houston’s SpawGlass, with a division in San Antonio, is performing much of the work not involving the crypts.
Managing construction with 18 to 22 interments a day, and sometimes up to 25, can be challenging, according to Wright. The cemetery staff works with the construction crews to adjust operations that could interfere with ceremonies or interments.
“If I have a ceremony going on, like we will have Memorial Day at our assembly area, everything shuts down,” Wright said in his temporary office in a trailer during construction. “If we’re holding an Army caisson service here at that same area, they will pretty much shut down operations behind it if it’s going to be disturbing to that service. We make sure that the deference goes to the family [versus] the construction that is going on at that moment.”
Any veteran who didn’t receive a dishonorable discharge is eligible for burial in the national cemetery, as well as service members who died while on active duty, active duty for training or inactive duty for training. Family members — including spouses or minor children of a veteran — also can be interred at the site.
Kriemhilde Durkin and her son spent Friday afternoon near the gravesite of her husband of 55 years, who died in 2014.
“This is a beautiful place — it’s always clean, always neat. It’s peaceful,” she said. “He was in the Army for 27 years, and he deserves to be here. All the people here care about their country.”
Engineers from the VA’s Office of Construction and Facilities Management have worked closely with local, state and national groups on historical, environmental and cultural considerations. Wright said the Texas Historical Commission provided extensive input to major repairs of a stone wall built in 1934. Stone masons have taken down the wall along Winans Road and are rebuilding it with a limestone mortar in keeping with the original construction after adding reinforcements to withstand current traffic conditions.
More than 180,000 people are interred in the cemetery’s 130,000 burial plots or above-ground columbaria, and about 5,000 remains are added each year. The highest number of burials occurred last year, but Wright expects the total to be less this year.
“Last year was the highest, but it’s ticked back down this year,” Wright said. “From what I’ve heard from my counterparts at other cemeteries, the numbers have been coming down this year a little bit. As we move away from the World War II generation, Korean War, on through Vietnam, we’ll find that there are less and less veterans. And as we have smaller groups of veterans, we’re going to have fewer and fewer burials.”
Wright has been the assistant director of the cemetery for almost three years. He returned to public service 10 years ago after a short stint in business following a 25-year Navy career.
“I remind people that we’re a benefits-delivery mechanism,” Wright said. “Our job is to deliver those benefits and the best customer service to our families that we serve at the worst time of need in their life. And help them to make that closure and that transition from losing a family member to going on with their lives and having a place where they can come back and reflect upon their relationships.”
Juanita Guerra also came to the cemetery Friday to visit her late husband, an Army veteran of the Korean War, and avoid the Memorial Day crowds. They were married for 68 years before he died in 2012.
“This is wonderful, because you can come and visit,” she said. “When we bought our house about 30 years ago in east Terrell Hills, he kept telling everybody, ‘I’m getting close to Fort Sam, I’m getting close to Fort Sam cemetery, to my cemetery.'”
