Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb__ A Tour of Presidential Gravesites - Brian Lamb [51]
From downtown Washington: Take Massachusetts Avenue north and follow to Wisconsin Avenue. Turn right onto Wisconsin Avenue. The Cathedral will be on your immediate right.
From Maryland and the north: Take I-95 to I-495 West, the Capital Beltway. Exit south on Wisconsin Avenue. The Cathedral is approximately 6.5 miles ahead on the left.
From Virginia and the south: Take I-495 over the American Legion Bridge into Maryland and take the Wisconsin Avenue/Bethesda exit. The Cathedral is approximately 6.5 miles on the left. Or, take the Memorial Bridge to the Lincoln Memorial, bearing right onto Rock Creek Parkway. (Note: Rock Creek Parkway is one way southbound during morning rush hour; buses cannot exit on Massachusetts Avenue.) Follow the parkway to Massachusetts Avenue, turning left onto Massachusetts Avenue. Follow Massachusetts Avenue to Wisconsin Avenue, and turn right. The Cathedral is on the immediate right.
The Cathedral is also accessible via Metrorail and Metrobus. On Metrorail, take the red line to the Tenleytown/AU station. Be sure to get a free bus transfer at the station. Exit on the west side of Wisconsin Avenue. Take any “30” series bus (#31, #32, #36, or #37) going south on Wisconsin Avenue. Ride approximately one and a half miles south on Wisconsin Avenue to the Cathedral.
To find Wilson’s tomb once inside the Cathedral, look for the Woodrow Wilson Bay at the center of the nave on the south side.
For additional information
Washington National Cathedral
Massachusetts and Wisconsin Avenues, NW
Washington, D.C. 20016-5098
Phone: (202) 537-6200
Fax: (202) 364-6600
www.cathedral.org/cathedral
“…an ailing Wilson insisted there would be no American entry into the League of Nations except on his terms.”
—Richard Norton Smith
If Theodore Roosevelt died too soon, Woodrow Wilson may have lived too long, in the process recalling Oscar Wilde’s lament that “each man kills the thing he loves.” Following a stroke in October 1919, an ailing Wilson insisted there would be no American entry into the League of Nations except on his terms.
In February 1924 when the ex-president “went west”—to use the euphemism popularized by World War I soldiers—he was buried under the floor of Bethlehem Chapel in Washington’s uncompleted Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul. Despite the presence of Admiral George Dewey, Cordell Hall, and Helen Keller, the National Cathedral never realized its planners’ original intent as a kind of American Westminister Abbey. But it attracts thousands of pilgrims each year, many of whom pause in the cool stone bay off the main nave where today the preacher’s son from Staunton, Virginia rests beneath a crusader’s cross.
—RNS
Wilson’s second wife, Edith, survived him by thirty-seven years. She is buried with him at the Cathedral.
Warren G. Harding
Buried: Harding Tomb, Marion, Ohio
Twenty-ninth President - 1921-1923
Born: November 2, 1865, in Corsica, Ohio
Died: 7:30 p.m. on August 2, 1923, in San Francisco, California
Age at death: 57
Cause of death: Heart attack
Final words: “That’s good. Go on, read some more.”
Admission to Harding Tomb: Free
Warren Harding’s administration lasted just over two years. His election to the presidency was the first in which women were allowed to vote nationwide. He was also the first president to ride in a car to his inauguration. A popular chief executive, he and his wife Florence hosted frequent parties at the White House, complete with alcohol then forbidden by the eighteenth amendment.
The couple was on a tour of the western states in the summer of 1923 when the president, already suffering from exhaustion, fell ill. Mrs. Harding stayed at his bedside in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. She read him an article from the Saturday Evening Post that portrayed