Fort Bayard National Cemetery is a United States National Cemetery in the Fort Bayard Historic District, near Silver City, New Mexico. It encompasses, and as of the end of 2005, had 3,732 interments. It is one of two national cemeteries in New Mexico (the other being Santa Fe), and is administered by Santa Fe National Cemetery.HistoryFort Bayard was established as a United States Army installation in 1866 to protect miners and other settlers in the area along the Apache Trail. The first interment in the cemetery was made the same year the post was founded. The fort was named after Brigadier General George Dashiell Bayard, who was mortally wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862. Fifteen square miles of land were set aside as the Fort Bayard Military Reservation by presidential order in 1869. In 1886, then-Second Lieutenant John Pershing arrived at Fort Bayard and oversaw the installation of a heliograph, linking the fort to an Army communications network from Arizona to Texas.
