Camp Butler National Cemetery is a United States National Cemetery located a few miles northeast of Springfield and a few miles southwest of Riverton, a small town nearby to Springfield, in Sangamon County, Illinois. It was named for the Illinois State Treasurer at the time of its establishment, William Butler. Administered by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, it occupies approximately , and is the site of 19,825 interments as of the end of 2005. Camp Butler National Cemetery was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. History During the Civil War, Camp Butler was the second largest military training camp in Illinois, second only to Camp Douglas in Chicago. After President Lincoln's call for troops in April, 1861, the U.S. War Department sent then Brigadier-General William T. Sherman to Springfield, Illinois, to meet with Governor Richard Yates for the purpose of selecting a suitable site for a training facility. Since Governor Yates was unfamiliar with the land around Springfield, the state capital of Illinois, he enlisted the aid of then-State Treasurer William Butler, who along with Ozias M. Hatch, Secretary of State of Illinois, took a carriage ride with William T. Sherman to examine land about 5 and 1/2 miles northeast of downtown Springfield. An area near Riverton, Illinois (then known as "Jimtown", short for Jamestown) was selected, and named in honor of William Butler. A Union training facility was officially established there on August 2, 1861. By the war's end, over 200,000 Union troops would pass through Camp Butler. Along with the soldiers who fought on both sides of the Civil War, veterans who lost their lives in the Spanish–American War, both World War I and World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War are also buried at Camp Butler. There are also German and Korean prisoners of war buried there, relocated from a cemetery near Indianapolis, Indiana. Civil War Originally the camp was designed to train and "muster-in" Illinois troops for the Civil War. It was quickly pressed into service to house the approximately 2,000 Confederate soldiers who had been taken prisoner at the surrender of Fort Donelson, in Tennessee on February 16, 1862. An area was set aside for the burial of Confederate prisoners of war who died at the camp. As many as 700 prisoners died in 1862 when smallpox and other diseases were rampant in the camp. The