It seems logical and pragmatic to me. They did indeed care for the graves: they replaced all the wooden markers and then they updated the marble ones to conform with standard practice at other sites. Anyone who visits graves knows that upright markers were deprecated long ago when they discovered how easy it was to run a mower across flattened ones.

The article implies that the bottom halves weren't inscribed or differentiated, and so in retaining the important half, the graveyard was cared for indeed, and $45 was earned on their sale, and someone now has a memorable home. I would argue that the home isn't made of gravestones, since without markings they again became ordinary marble slabs.

(Disclaimer: I am a Catholic who venerates holy relics and finds charnel houses fascinating.)

Times and standards change. Today, western countries rarely if ever do battlefield burials; bodies are shipped back home to their families whenever they can be recovered. A hundred years ago, it was much more common to bury solders near where they died. Go back another hundred years, and it was common to see wounded soldiers executed with bayonets where they lay and left to rot, corpses were generally looted by locals and the bodies eventually pushed into unmarked mass graves. Henry Dunant witnessed this sort of thing in 1859 in the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino, and went on to found the Red Cross because of it. The modern premise of war cemeteries with individually marked graves was fairly novel during the mid 19th century when the the American Civil War was being fought. During the American Revolutionary War, bodies were scattered around the countryside, in (often unmarked) graves at whatever churchyard was closest. Most of these graves have been obliterated by the passage of time, like most other graves in old forgotten churchyards.

That a hundred years ago these cemeteries weren't treated with the same reverence we expect today doesn't seem surprising. The way our culture treats dead soldiers has changed a great deal in a fairly short period of time.

More on this subject: http://www.remembrancetrails-northernfrance.com/history/grea...

I decided to do a little bit of research. Up until 1933 the War Department maintained that cemetery after which responsibility was transferred to the National Park Service. It looks like NPS was the ones that decided to cut the headstones based on the dates.

The real sad thing about this is that those are only the positively identified remains. There are twice as many unmarked graves. And a nearby Confederate cemetery has 30,000 buried and only 2,000 identified.

https://www.nps.gov/pete/learn/historyculture/poplar-grove-n...

What else should they have done with a bunch of strangely sized marble slabs?

They could either not care for the graves at all, or care for them a little bit. I can practically guarantee that there was someone at city hall that fought to get even this much.

I agree; they didn't want to care for the graves of the Union soldiers in a Confederate town; in a way, this is desecration. And these sound like they were markers from the federal government, so they didn't belong to the city anyway.

Did it really cost more to mow around them than to cut them in half? Sounds like the man had some corrupt friends in city hall who got him a great deal on marble blocks!