Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb__ A Tour of Presidential Gravesites - Brian Lamb [7]
Another historian who encouraged my experiential learning is Douglas Brinkley, who wrote the after word for our book. Doug’s an historian and Jimmy Carter biographer, and, at Rice University, has been known to pile his students onto a vehicle dubbed “The Majic Bus,” to visit significant American cultural and historic sites. Doug is the kind of teacher who understands that personal experiences contribute to learning in ways that reading and lectures alone cannot.
Encouraged by the expeditions of these two historians, I began my own presidential gravesite tour in 1995, visiting and photographing thirty-six presidential graves and the libraries of the living former presidents over the next eighteen months. My journey began at Arlington National Cemetery, where two presidents are buried—John F. Kennedy and William Howard Taft, the only president to also serve as Chief Justice. Next was Washington’s National Cathedral, where Woodrow Wilson lies beneath the stone floors of the church, in the style of the great European cathedrals. With a small touch of symbolism, I also ended my tour in the Washington area, visiting George Washington’s burial site at Mount Vernon on a cold and quiet New Year’s Day 1997.
Visiting the thirty-two other presidential gravesites in short order led to its share of adventures. In my initial days of grave-hopping, I planned a Hudson Valley swing, a triple-hitter, hoping to conquer the gravesites of Chester A. Arthur, Martin Van Buren, and Franklin Roosevelt in a single weekend. Arriving at the Albany airport on a Friday afternoon, I set out in a rental car for Albany Rural Cemetery where President Arthur is buried, only to find that the gates had closed at 5:00 p.m. I’d come too far to miss it. Spying no one, I decided to climb the cemetery’s stone fence. Thankfully, I was able to find the grave, pay my respects, and snap a few photos without getting caught.
Readers of our book won’t have to break any cemetery rules. Grant’s Tomb gives detailed directions and visiting hours for every presidential gravesite. Those planning longer trips will find the memorials grouped by state in the appendix.
You will also find that many of the cemeteries on our presidential tour are filled with other interesting persons. In Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery, James Garfield has tycoon John D. Rockefeller, Ohio political boss Mark Hanna, and Lincoln assistant John Hay as his eternal neighbors. A stone’s throw from Benjamin Harrison’s grave in Indianapolis’ Crown Hill Cemetery are three vice presidential resting sites—those of Thomas Hendricks (Grover Cleveland), Charles Fairbanks (Theodore Roosevelt), and Thomas Riley Marshall (Woodrow Wilson). A little additional exploration in these and other cemeteries will likely lead you to discoveries of your own.
Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb? was an outgrowth of C-SPAN’s 1999 television series, American Presidents: Life Portraits. During this nine-month series, our cameras visited the birthplaces, gravesites, libraries, and family homes of the forty-one men who had then served as our country’s chief executives. Hours of video about each president has been archived on our web site, www.c-span.org, along with biographical and historic details about each president and links to other sites.
Like our television series, this book was a collective effort by a number of people at C-SPAN. Carol Hellwig, now a former member of our executive staff, was the book’s primary researcher and writer. With my tour and photos as her base, Carol spent months combing documents in the Library of Congress, reading presidential anthologies, and phoning cemeteries. Weeks of writing presidential death scenes, Carol reports, turned her into a uniquely interesting dinner table conversationalist.
Carol had assistance from Anne Bentzel and Molly Murchie, and from interns Megan FitzPatrick and