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This Civil War Memorial is located in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, California in Alameda County.
From the second Mountain View Cemetery book, History Is All Around Us:
After the Civil War, former members of the victorious Union Army created the country's first veterans' organization - the Grand Army of the Republic, the GAR.
The GAR formed "posts" Throughout the United States including the Lyon & Appomattox posts in Oakland, the Joe Hooker Post in Alameda and the Lookout Mountain Post in Berkeley.
They had powerful friends including General Ralph Kirkham, who had succeeded Samuel Merritt as president of Mountain View Cemetery in 1865. Kirkham made certain his fellow veterans had proper burying grounds at the cemetery and set aside part of plot 12 for that purpose.
A pair of palm trees once graced the plot; today's magnolia trees stand in the stead. On April 3, 1875, Captain W. W. Scott was laid to rest, the first of two hundred veterans in the plot. In 1893, members of the GAR dedicated a monument crowned with a pall-draped urn.
Then just in time for Memorial Day 1897, they gave a glamorous makeover, ringing it with seven hundred fifty cannon balls, placing four 12-pound howitzers at the corners and laying out more cannon balls some in pyramids, others in the shape of an anchor.
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