BLACKFOOT — Gov. Brad Little, the Idaho Division of Veterans Services and the Veterans of Eastern Idaho on Friday dedicated the Blackfoot Veterans Cemetery, the second state veterans cemetery and the first in East Idaho.

The cemetery opened in Blackfoot in December 2020. Its dedication ceremony on Friday came just two weeks ahead of Veterans Day on Nov. 11 this year and was nearly five years in the making, as the Blackfoot cemetery project was announced in December of 2016.

The ceremony was complete with dozens of waving American flags scattering the grounds, veterans in uniform, a flyover and a moment of silence led by Idaho State Veterans Cemetery Administrator James Earp. 

Earp said the cemetery in Blackfoot will serve as a "national shrine for our veterans and their families in perpetuity," and the dedication ceremony and the moment of silence he led during it ensured "those who answered our country's call to service and those who were prisoners of war, missing in action and killed in action" that they are not forgotten. 

The cemetery now accompanies one other such cemetery in Idaho, which opened in Boise in 2004. It will serve more than 20,000 families in East Idaho — families that would have otherwise had to travel to Boise or elsewhere to visit and honor their veteran loved ones.

The Idaho Division of Veterans Services in a public statement on Friday thanked the citizens of Idaho, who have “supported our veterans and made this cemetery possible.” The cemetery in Blackfoot, IDVS said, “will serve the Veterans of Eastern Idaho and their families for generations to come.”

The cemetery was added to the Veterans Legacy Memorial, an online memorial space managed by the National Cemetery Administration, which manages more than 150 national cemeteries and memorializes more than 3.7 million veterans in a digital memorial space with a VLM profile page.

The 40-acre cemetery is located at 2651 Cromwell Ln. It has plots for in-ground casket burials, three options for cremation, space for in-ground inurnment, a scatter garden and a columbarium, a building with urn nooks.