For Four Dead Presidents

(Author's Note: The following article was originally posted three years ago, as you can see by reading the date above. Thus the reference below to Lincoln's 200th birthday is a little outdated.  This is being revived as part of Taphophile Tragics.)



This being President's Week, and with me being a well-known habitué of graveyards, I thought it would be the perfect time to, ahem, dig up a selection of photographs featuring the final resting places of some of our former leaders. Or at least the four I've been to.

With all of the celebrations for Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday last week, I think it'd be interesting to see how he spends his time these days. First, from a May, 2007 drive along Route 66, are two shots from Lincoln's tomb at the Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois.

The giant hunk of marble above may look like a sarcophagus, but it's merely a marker to cover a ten-foot deep crypt which holds what must be a very well-preserved body, as Lincoln was reportedly the poster child for the then-new art of embalming. After all, it was a long, hot train ride from Washington D. C. to Springfield, Illinois back in 1865, and millions of mourning Americans wanted a final (or more likely, first) glimpse of their fallen leader. So like a 21st century baseball player, Abe was juiced up at regular intervals along the ride home, and it's not unlikely that he'd be recognizable today.

Up there on the right is the 117-foot tall granite obelisk rising above the tomb.

(Lincoln was buried so deep, and with that huge marker on top, because of various plots to kidnap the body, one of which was attempted before this tomb was completed, when the remains were still in the cemetery's receiving vault.) 

September 1985

Grant's Tomb, on the upper west side of Manhattan, has absolutely no one buried in it. What it does have is Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia entombed within, their caskets in a well below the floor but above the ground, both housed within a domed Greek Revival temple with this simple entableture above the entrance. I used this picture for my holiday card in 1987.

Young's Memorial Cemetery, Oyster Bay, NY

Theodore Roosevelt and his second wife, Edith, rest beneath a canopy of trees not far from Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, Long Island. A set of stone steps lead up a hill to the ivy-covered private plot, the stone with its columns and bas-relief presidential seal behind a tall, wrought-iron fence.

This image is a VanGoghlaroid from May of 1998.

February 2009

Finally, with this picture we pay a visit to the Coolidge family, on a hillside of their own in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Silent Cal (or, more appropriately today, Ever-Silent Cal) has the presidential seal atop his stone, which is the second from the right. Left of that is his wife, Grace, while their sons flank them: John on the left and Calvin, Jr. on the right. Grace's matching headstone is adorned with a simple wreath, while Cal Jr.'s smaller one (he died at 16, and was the first burial in the family plot in 1924) and brother John's have wreaths with ribbons.  

Coolidge became the 30th president upon the death of Warren G. Harding, and was sworn in by his father at a quarter to three in the morning in the parlor of the nearby family home. In addition to being the only president to be born on the fourth of July, he is also the only president sworn in by a notary public.

Something curious I learned about the names of these Coolidge men. President Coolidge was named after his father, so his full name was John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. (although he never used the Junior.)  Yet he gave his first son the simple name John Coolidge, then two years later named his second son Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

Vangoghlaroids Revisited

Long Beach - July 3, 1998

For the last week or so I've been cleaning my office. At least, that's what I've been calling it. What I'm actually doing is delving into the piles of crap on tables and countertops and putting bits and pieces of them in different places. Anything incredibly outdated or unrecognizable gets thrown away. In a way I'm getting things done: I've had color prints of various sizes lying on flat surfaces all around the room, now they're all in one place. They're in a horrible pile, I've yet to sort through them, but at least they're on a single flat surface.

Fire Island - August 25, 1997

Naturally, at least half the crap you turn up while doing a task like this sidetracks you for a moment, or an hour, depending if it's just crap, really crap, or something you need to consider more thoroughly before deciding that it just really is crap. So when I found myself looking at two portfolios of Vangoghlaroids, I knew there wasn't going to be much more that I'd be getting done that evening.

These were the unsold remains of a collection that I carried around during my traveling art show days. I'd leave these, along with another couple portfolios of black and white pieces open on a table for browsing. Of course, the top scene wasn't a single image ten years ago, it was originally matted as a triptych. The three pictures (with the center one trimmed to fit the mount) are still together, I was able to keep them taped for the scan. I cut and moved the images together in Photoshop. I still need to even out some of the tones a little better, when I do I'll be printing it to about twenty inches wide.