There are three operating veterans' cemeteries in Massachusetts:

The Massachusetts National Cemetery, in Bourne, on Cape Cod. Dedicated on October 11, 1980.

The Massachusetts Veterans' Memorial Cemetery, in Agawam. Opened - May 2001.

The Massachusetts Veterans' Memorial Cemetery, in Winchendon. Opened - November 2004.

The veterans cemetery in Bourne (adjacent to Joint Base Cape Cod) is set among rolling, wooded hills. The flush grave markers are set in lush lawns frequented by wild turkey. One can obtain a printed map to navigate the many roadways by typing in a name in the computer kiosk mounted outside of the administrative building.

Office Hours: Monday thru Friday 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Closed federal holidays except Memorial Day.

Visitation Hours: Open daily from dawn to dusk.


Massachusetts National Cemetery is located in Barnstable County on Cape Cod, approximately 65 miles southeast of Boston and adjacent to the Otis Air Force Base.

On June 18, 1973, Congress passed the National Cemetery Act which transferred 82 of the Army's national cemeteries to the Veteran's Administration (VA). The following year, the VA's National Cemetery System adopted the regional cemetery concept plan in which one large national cemetery would be built within each of the 10 standard federal regions, as established by the General Services Administration. A policy was also established that new cemeteries would only be created on land already owned by the federal government.

Twenty five years had passed since the government last acquired land for construction of a new national cemetery and that was in 1949 for the Willamette National Cemetery, in Oregon. No new national cemetery had been built in the New England region in nearly forty years, since 1936, when the Long Island National Cemetery opened.

During the mid-1970s, when the National Cemetery System was looking to expand, it determined that the largest veteran population in the northeast was centered in the Boston area. A search soon commenced to find a suitable site for a national cemetery, nearby. The difficult task of locating land which would be available to the government at no cost eventually led to the identification of a 749-acre tract on the 22,000-acre Otis Air Force Base as the most likely site. The base occupied land that was leased to the Department of Defense (DOD). A portion of this lease was terminated and the title for 749.29 acres was transferred to the VA's National Cemetery System in 1976. The Otis tract became the first parcel of land acquired by the National Cemetery System for the specific purpose of building a new national cemetery since 1949.

The Massachusetts National Cemetery was dedicated on October 11, 1980 and became the third new national cemetery to open in nearly 30 years. Calverton, New York, and Riverside, California, were the first and second, respectively. The site was officially named the Veterans Administration National Cemetery of Bourne, Mass., but over time the lengthy appellation changed in practice, if not in fact, to simply, Massachusetts National Cemetery.

Monuments and Memorials

Massachusetts National Cemetery has a memorial trail where, as of June 2013, 50 memorials placed in memory of veterans from World War I to the modern era.

Medal of Honor Recipients
The Medal of Honor is the highest award for valor in action against an enemy force that can be bestowed upon an individual serving in the Armed Services of the United States. Recipients receive the Medal of Honor from the president on behalf of Congress. It was first awarded during the Civil War and eligibility criteria for the Medal of Honor have changed over time.

Recipients buried or memorialized here:

Sergeant First Class Jared C. Monti (Afghanistan). Massachusetts native Jared C. Monti (1975-2006) graduated from Bridgewater-Raynham High School in 1994. He had joined the National Guard's delayed-entry program as a junior and at 18 completed basic training. Monti was deployed five times over twelve years. On his last mission, Monti was with the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan. He was leading a 16-member intelligence-gathering team on June 21, 2006, when they encountered enemy fire. One of his soldiers was wounded, and Monti risked his own life twice to rescue him and died on a third attempt. President Barack Obama presented the Medal of Honor to Monti's family in 2009. He is buried in Section 11, Site 38.

Hospital Corpsman Richard David DeWert (Korea). He received the Medal of Honor posthumously for service in the U.S. Navy in recognition of courageous initiative rendering medical assistance and heroic self-sacrifice in Korea, April 5, 1951. His remains were returned to the United States in October and interred in Woodlawn National Cemetery in New York. When Massachusetts National Cemetery opened, his family requested his remains be reinterred in his home state which occurred on October 14, 1987, in Section 5, Site 167.

Other Burials

Massachusetts-born Melina Olive Shaw (nee Girard) was among the 233 "Hello Girls" who served in the U.S. Army during World War I — a status officially recognized only in the 1970s. Her French Canadian father was a physician and Olive likely learned French from his assistants. Both her parents died when she was a child, and she wed James Shaw in 1909 but the marriage was short-lived. Shaw may have studied at the Sorbonne before the war, but she was attending the New England Conservancy in 1918 when she applied for the bilingual telephone-operator position with the Army Signal Corps. After the war she worked for U.S. Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers. Private Shaw was one of eighteen living "Hello Girls" veterans honorably discharged in 1979 after 61 years. She died the following July and became the first interment at Massachusetts National Cemetery on October 14, 1980 (Section 1, Site 1).

Unknown United States Soldier. Interred on Aug. 4, 1990, in Section 5, Site 107. The remains were unearthed during highway excavation in South Carolina in the 1980s. He was identified as a member of the "Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry" by the buttons from his uniform. Additionally, six unknown Union soldiers interred June 10, 2006 in Section 14.