I. The SOLDIER'S NATIONAL CEMETERY, Baltimore Road to Taneyton Road, at the southern boundary of Gettysburg, embraces 17 acres and contains graves of 3,604 soldiers, 979 of them unidentified. The cemetery was established through the efforts of Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin, of Pennsylvania, and David Wills, of Gettysburg. Curtin, visiting the battlefield shortly after the troops departed, was shocked to find that shallow, scattered graves revealed portions of uniformed corpses above ground. He took measures to collect the bodies and inter them decently. In the cemetery stands the 60-foot marble Soldiers' National Monument, designed by J.G. Batterson and executed in Italy under the supervision of Randolph Rogers. It occupies the site where Lincoln gave his address. Near by is the Lincoln Speech Memorial, a semicircular monument with a bust of the Great Emancipator. --- Pennsylvania: A Guide to the Keystone State, 1940; page 232
A major problem with war, especially a bloody and horrible one is where to put the bodies. After Gettysburg, stacks and stacks of bodies were hastily buried and some not even at all. The governor and local officials were deeply troubled by this to the point where they took action and used the space across from the battlefield to re-inter the dead, which they did over a period of several months. Before the work was finished, Lincoln came, the cemetery was dedicated and the Gettysburg Address became history.
A sign of history located at the main gate, just inside and to the right of the main walkway tells the story:
Soldier's National Cemetery contains the graves of more than 6,000 United States servicemen, including 3,580 Union soldiers killed in the Civil War. Nearly half the Civil War burials are unknown soldiers.
A few days after the battle, Andrew Curtin, Governor of Pennsylvania, visited Gettysburg and was deeply moved by what he saw. Bodies of soldiers had been hurriedly buried on the battlefield, and some had not been buried at all. Curtin and representatives of Northern states took steps to create a national cemetery. Beginning in October 1863, bodies were carefully removed from the field and re-interred here. The work took five months.
On November 19, 1863, before the burials were completed, government officials, battle veterans, and citizens assembled to dedicate the cemetery. Near the end of the ceremonies, the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, offered a few remarks - his Gettysburg Address.
From my pals at Wikipedia: Gettysburg National Cemetery is located on Cemetery Hill in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg, with the support of Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin, the site was purchased and Union dead were moved from shallow and inadequate burial sites on the battlefield to the cemetery. Local attorney David Wills was the man primarily responsible for acquiring the land, overseeing the construction of the cemetery, and planning its dedication ceremony, although the initial concept and early organizational efforts were led by rival lawyer David McConaughy. The landscape architect William Saunders, founder of the National Grange, designed the cemetery. It was originally called Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg.