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The State Veterans Cemetery at Quincy — and It Has Been There Since the Civil War

This state runs its own veterans cemetery, attached to the veterans home at Quincy. Sunset Cemetery provides interment and perpetual care for eligible veterans and spouses, and more than 7,000 veterans and their spouses lie there, some dating back to the Civil War. The department publishes almost nothing else about it — no eligibility criteria, no fee schedule and no application route — so the phone call is the whole of the process.

Verified August 23, 2026

What this benefit is

This state runs its own veterans cemetery, attached to the veterans home at Quincy. Sunset Cemetery provides interment and perpetual care for eligible veterans and spouses, and more than 7,000 veterans and their spouses lie there, some dating back to the Civil War. The department publishes almost nothing else about it — no eligibility criteria, no fee schedule and no application route — so the phone call is the whole of the process.

What it's worth: Interment and perpetual care at the state veterans cemetery at Quincy for eligible veterans and spouses; the department publishes no fee schedule and no eligibility criteria

  • The department states that Sunset Cemetery provides interment and perpetual care for eligible veterans and spouses.
  • The department states that over 7,000 veterans and their spouses, dating back to the Civil War, are at rest there.
  • The cemetery is associated with the veterans home at Quincy, founded in 1886 and the state's largest and oldest.
  • The department gives the address as 1707 N. 12th Street, Quincy.
  • The department does not publish eligibility requirements, a fee structure, an application procedure or how to arrange a burial, and directs enquiries to the home's adjutant instead.

Who is entitled to it

  • Your discharge characterisation is within the range these run on.
  • You are in this state.

Not sure whether that describes you?

Answer a few questions about this benefit specifically — we only ask what this one actually depends on, and we stop as soon as we know.

How to claim it

  1. 1Ring the adjutant at the veterans home and ask three questions in one call: who is eligible, what it costs, and how a burial is arranged. None of the three is published anywhere, so the call is not optional.
  2. 2Ask specifically what a SPOUSE interment costs. Every comparable state cemetery examined charges something for a spouse or charges nothing very deliberately; this one publishes neither position.
  3. 3Ask whether availability is limited. The site is old and has been expanded with federal grant money in recent years, which is usually a sign that capacity is the constraint.
  4. 4Write down the answers with a date and the name of the person who gave them. Where an agency publishes nothing, your own note of the call is the only record the family will have.
  5. 5Compare it against a national cemetery before deciding. There are federal options in this state, and a family choosing between them should be comparing on eligibility and cost rather than on proximity alone.
  6. 6Keep this separate from the headstone setting reimbursement and the county indigent-burial duty already recorded for this state. They are different claims to different bodies and none of them rules out the others.
Form
No published form — arrangements are made by telephone with the adjutant at the veterans home at Quincy
File with
The Illinois Department of Veterans' Affairs, at the veterans home at Quincy
No renewal
Once granted it does not need renewing.
CorrectionGuides that say this state has no state veterans cemetery are wrong. It has one, at Quincy, and it is older than most of the federal ones. What it does not have is a published eligibility page, which is why it disappears from summaries.
Known gapEligibility criteria, fees, capacity and the application route are all unpublished. Everything in this record beyond the cemetery's existence and purpose has to be confirmed by telephone, and that is the honest position rather than a gap in the research.

Sources

This finder provides an informational match, not a government eligibility determination. The responsible agency decides your application.