Arlington began as the estate of George Washington Parke Custis, grandson of Martha Washington. Custis started Arlington House around 1802 as a home, working plantation, and memorial to George Washington. Enslaved people built and sustained the estate. Custis's daughter Mary Anna Randolph Custis married U.S. Army officer Robert E. Lee, and the couple used Arlington as a family home. Custis's 1857 will required the people he enslaved to be freed within five years, a process Lee completed in 1862.

After Virginia seceded in 1861 and Lee resigned from the U.S. Army, Union forces occupied the strategically commanding property opposite Washington. The army built camps and defenses there, while the federal government collected wartime taxes and took title after Mary Lee could not appear in person to pay. A Freedman's Village established on the estate in 1863 housed formerly enslaved people and developed schools, churches, farms, and wage work, although federal officials later closed the community and displaced its residents.

Mounting Civil War deaths overwhelmed burial grounds near Washington. The first military burial at Arlington took place on May 13, 1864, and Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs soon directed that additional graves be placed near Arlington House, making restoration of the property to the Lee family more difficult. In June the War Department formally set aside about 200 acres as a military cemetery. Thousands of Union dead, including unidentified remains gathered from battlefields, were buried there before the war ended.

The Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Lee in 1882 that the government's tax seizure had been unlawful because the family had not received due process. George Washington Custis Lee recovered legal title and then sold the property to the United States in 1883. The cemetery continued to grow. Memorial Amphitheater was dedicated in 1920, and an unidentified American service member from World War I was interred at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in 1921. Unknowns from later wars and nationally prominent military and civilian figures followed.

Arlington remains an active Army cemetery rather than a conventional museum. Funerals and military ceremonies occur daily, and eligibility rules shape future use of limited space. The Army also conserves historic structures, grave markers, monuments, specimen trees, roads, and views across a 639-acre landscape. Interpretation increasingly includes the Custis-Lee plantation, slavery, Freedman's Village, segregated burial practices, and the cemetery's changing commemorative traditions. Visitors enter through security screening and share the grounds with bereaved families and ceremonial units.