Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb__ A Tour of Presidential Gravesites - Brian Lamb [13]
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Monticello
Box 316
Charlottesville, VA 22902
Phone: (434) 984-9822
www.monticello.org
“‘Nothing is better than a reliable friend,’ wrote Jefferson.”
—Richard Norton Smith
All the DNA evidence in the world will tell you less about Thomas Jefferson than climbing his little mountain, where the philosopher who insisted that the earth belonged to the living made a poignant exception of an eighty-foot-square patch of blood-red soil just below its summit. “Nothing is better than a reliable friend,” wrote Jefferson. Together with his closest friend, Dabney Carr, the future president concluded an adolescent pact under whose terms the survivor would bury his companion beneath a great oak tree on the mountainside. Carr enjoyed a meteoric rise through the colony’s legal and political elite, marrying Jefferson’s sister and establishing himself as a forensic rival to Patrick Henry.
Unfortunately, everything about Carr’s life was to be premature, including death from bilious fever before his thirtieth birthday. Faithful to his promise, Jefferson moved the remains of his friend from their original grave to the hillside site hallowed by boyish memory. Simultaneously he calculated that at the rate the workmen prepared Monticello’s graveyard, a single laborer could grub an acre in four days. It was vintage Jefferson, more precise than emotional—unless one credits the latest evidence of his long rumored liaison with Sally Hemmings, whose descendants have reasons of their own for seeking a place near Dabney Carr’s oak tree.
—RNS
Thomas Jefferson’s grave on the grounds of Monticello
James Madison
Buried: Montpelier Estate, Montpelier Station, Virginia
Fourth President - 1809-1817
Born: March 16, 1751, in Port Conway, Virginia
Died: June 28, 1836, at Montpelier, Virginia
Age at death: 85
Cause of death: Heart failure
Final words: “Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear.”
Admission to Montpelier Estate: $14.00
He was a statesman best known as the “Father of the Constitution.” Yet, had he lived in the modern media age, James Madison might never have become president. Our shortest president at 5’4”, the soft-spoken Madison lacked the qualities of a successful politician. Luckily, his wife Dolley had enough for both of them. Attractive and outgoing, she made the White House the center of the capital’s social circuit. While her husband led America to victory over Britain in the War of 1812, Dolley is remembered for saving George Washington’s portrait from the burning White House.
James and Dolley Madison left the White House in 1817 after his two terms as president. They spent the next nineteen years at Montpelier, their estate in Virginia’s Orange County. Even though he was one of the county’s largest landowners, Madison had little money in retirement; a number of poor crops meant even less to live on. Yet he continued to contribute to the public discourse through debates on the slavery issue and through his involvement with Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia. After Jefferson’s death, Madison served as the university’s rector until his own health began to decline.
Dolley Madison’s grave at Montpelier
During the first six months of 1836, James Madison was unable to leave his bedroom, his body plagued by a debilitating case of rheumatism. A neighbor of Jefferson’s in the Virginia piedmont, Madison was treated by the same physician, Dr. Robley Dunglison, who tended to Jefferson in his final days. In his last months, clearly on the verge of death, Madison was told that drugs could prolong his life until the Fourth of July. He refused to try and delay the inevitable