<Tr> <Th> Website </Th> <Td> www.ArlingtonCemetery.mil </Td> </Tr> <P> Arlington National Cemetery is a United States military cemetery in Arlington County, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., in whose 624 acres (253 ha) the dead of the nation's conflicts have been buried, beginning with the Civil War, as well as reinterred dead from earlier wars . The United States Department of the Army, a component of the United States Department of Defense (DoD), controls the cemetery . </P> <P> The national cemetery was established during the Civil War on the grounds of Arlington House, which had been the estate of the family of Confederate general Robert E. Lee's wife Mary Anna (Custis) Lee (a great - granddaughter of Martha Washington). The Cemetery, along with Arlington House, Memorial Drive, the Hemicycle, and the Arlington Memorial Bridge, form the Arlington National Cemetery Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in April 2014 . Like nearly all federal installations in Arlington County, it has a Washington, D.C. mailing address . </P> <P> In recent years, the Department of the Army has made plans and taken actions to expand the cemetery onto public lands that the National Park Service (NPS) controlled or that Arlington County or the Commonwealth of Virginia owned, as well as to restrict bicycle use within the cemetery . These plans and actions have become controversial . </P>

Who owned arlington cemetery before the civil war