Presidential Gravesites: Accidental Egalitarianism
The Basilica of Saint-Denis, north of Paris, held the remains of 42 French kings until 1793, when French revolutionaries desecrated and ransacked the place. Westminster Abbey, never plundered by archaeologists or insurgents, still houses the bones of 30 English monarchs, from Edward the Confessor (d. 1066) to George II (d. 1760).
America’s dead presidents are spread more evenly—one could almost say, more democratically—across the land. You could argue that this expresses a deep truth about the more egalitarian nature of republican government.
In reality, the U.S. came pretty close to having its own mausoleum crammed with expired heads of state. That trend could have been set, but was ultimately avoided, by what happened to the remains of George Washington. When the first president (and by that time, first ex-president) died in 1799, the fledgling U.S. Congress voted to entomb the Father of the Nation in a burial chamber under the U.S. Capitol.
With that building then still under construction, Washington was provisionally interred in the family crypt at Mount Vernon, his Virginia estate, now known as the Old Tomb. His body was kept there in a non-final resting place, while Congress continued to argue over cost and design of the ultimate one.
Stealing Washington’s Skull
Things came to a head, literally, when in 1830 a disgruntled ex-employee of the estate attempted to steal Washington’s skull. The crypt was by then so dilapidated that the thief proved unable to identify the right grave and ran off with the skull of a distant relative instead.
Following the incident, Congress again demanded the return of Washington’s bones. But the Washington family took matters into their own hands, thereby profoundly affecting the course of American presidential funerary history. The Washingtons built their illustrious forefather a whole new crypt on the grounds of Mount Vernon—which is as he wanted it, incidentally—and that New Tomb is where his remains remain.
The burial chamber two floors below the Capitol’s Rotunda known as “Washington’s Tomb” has remained empty, and therefore never became the template for subsequent presidential burials. Most of those followed the pattern established by Washington, with U.S. presidents generally choosing their hometowns as final resting places. Hence, there is no American equivalent to Westminster Abbey, or an Egypt-inspired Valley of the Presidents.