Memorials, Cemeteries and White House History (#78)

The pursuit of White House history has often taken the Quarterly through cemetery gates but this issue is our first wholly devoted to visiting to the grave sites of not only the presidents but also their loved ones, their neighbors, their friends and their enemies, and even the journalists and historians who documented their stories. Principal photographer Bruce White spent two years on the hills and winding paths of cemeteries capturing the beauty of these final resting places and calls the experience “moving and poignant—looking at the memorials is like reading biographies in miniature.”
 
Rebecca Roberts opens the issue with a tour of Congressional Cemetery, established in 1807. Nearly every member of Congress who died in office in the
early nineteenth century was either laid to rest here or remembered by the distinctive cube-shaped and domed cenotaphs found nowhere else. In Georgetown, across the city from Congressional Cemetery, Emily Guzick leads us through Oak Hill Cemetery, designed to embrace the natural landscape. Here we find the mausoleum that once held the son of President Abraham Lincoln, Willie Lincoln, who died in the White House. Clifford Krainik takes us back to the Civil War, when the U.S. government seized Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Arlington estate, transforming it by 1864 into a cemetery for the Union’s war dead. Krainik highlights the burial sites of President John F. Kennedy and President William Howard Taft, as well as presidential son Robert Todd Lincoln and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Louis Picone takes us to the Grant National Memorial in New York City and explains that the 150-foot-tall tomb was, and remains, the largest tomb in North America. In contrast, Jessie Kratz takes us to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, where President Hoover lies beneath a simple white marble slab of his own design. Margaret Strolle continues the exploration of Washington, D.C., cemeteries with stops at Rock Creek and Mount Olivet. She highlights the burial site of the designer and builder of the White House, James Hoban. Russell Beckman recounts his fifty-year quest to visit the grave site of every U.S. president. His presidential encounters from Vermont to California have inspired his life and reflect Americans’ respect and affection for the men who have led the nation for more than two hundred years.