Beaufort National Cemetery was established by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 as a burial ground for Union soldiers who died in the Sea Islands during the war. It now holds more than 22,000 graves, laid out in a striking semicircle radiating from a central flagpole; the pattern is easiest to appreciate from the air but is visible on the ground too once you walk into it.
Civil War dead occupy the inner rings; later twentieth-century veterans, including casualties from both world wars, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, fill the outer ones. The cemetery is open to visitors daily and is quiet, well-kept, and worth a half-hour stop on the way north out of town.