To survive decades of neglect and decay, a national landmark has gone to the dogs.
From dawn to dusk, they romp and run along its paths and driveways in a landscape of picturesque tombstones and monuments. Some 70,000 people are buried in what the arched gate identifies as the Congressional Cemetery, but is more aptly described on one worn monument as “the city of silence.”
To help overcome a perennial lack of money for upkeep, the cemetery’s superintendent, former Chicagoan John Hanley, decided three years ago to let dog owners and their pets use the cemetery if the owners made a $100 annual contribution to the Association for the Preservation of the Historic Congressional Cemetery, plus an extra $5 for each family pooch.
This privilege, however, requires owners to keep their pets from running wild and disturbing visitors. Out of respect for the notable gravesites, pet owners are also advised to come equipped with a pooper scooper.
Opening the cemetery to dogs “upset a few folks at first, but it seemed to be the sensible thing to do,” says Hanley, who can often be seen mowing and raking the 32-acre grounds. “For some of those buried here, the dogs have been the only visitors in the last 100 years.”
Located 20 blocks east of the Capitol near Pennsylvania Avenue, the non-denominational cemetery claims a variety of historic Americans unmatched anywhere else: a signer of the Declaration of Independence and vice president, 79 members of Congress from the 18th through the 20th Centuries, veterans from the Revolutionary to Vietnam Wars, and the first female presidential candidate to receive votes.
According to Hanley, the cemetery association has 800 dues-paying members–130 or so of whom have organized an informal canine corps. The presence of dogs–with a canine rush hour occurring in the early morning and evening–has eliminated vandalism, he says, and made it “the safest garden in the world.”
No government help
In the capital of the world’s biggest-spending government, the cemetery seems like an anomaly. It receives no funding from Congress, the city, the National Park Service or any other governmental entity.
Still, there’s an outside chance Congress may look more kindly on the cemetery. Last November a black granite monument was placed in the cemetery by the family of the late House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill of Massachusetts, who died in 1991 and was buried on Cape Cod. The memorial has yet to be dedicated, but association member Jim Oliver hopes the occasion will call attention to the cemetery’s plight. He blames that on the fact that the place “is not well-known or appreciated” by legislators, as is the grander, 500-acre, federally supported Arlington National Cemetery in nearby Virginia.
(Arlington became a military cemetery in 1864 on the confiscated estate of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and wife Mary Anne Randolph Custis Lee. In the 20th Century it has become the burial ground of such notables as Generals John Pershing of World War I and George Marshall of World War II, Presidents John Kennedy and William Howard Taft, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Sen. Robert Kennedy.)
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs regularly sends workers to mow and trim the small section of Congressional Cemetery in which rows of grim sandstone monuments known as cenotaphs commemorate members of Congress buried elsewhere.
Many of the names are so obscure that even Hanley cannot capsulize the lives and times of such people as Rep. Silas Burroughs of New York (1810-1860), Rep. Cyrus Spink of Ohio (1793-1859) and Sen. Moses Norris of New Hampshire (1799-1855).
The practice of erecting cenotaphs flourished in the 19th Century and was revived in the 1970s to honor the late Reps. Hale Boggs of Louisiana and Nicholas Begich of Alaska, passengers on a plane that disappeared in 1972 over Alaska.
Last year the dog owners’ contributions amounted to roughly $13,000–more than 10 percent of the cemetery’s annual budget of $100,000, which comes mostly from the cemetery-preservation group. The canine corps also conducts massive cleanups throughout the year because Hanley has only a single full-time and one part-time helper to keep the grass and weeds from obscuring the tombs.
“In Chicago this would be a valuable place for the Daleys to get votes,” observes Hanley while leading a visitor around the cemetery, “but in Congress members know they won’t win any votes by taking care of this place.”
Cemetery dates to 1807
Hanley, who was once involved in banking and Lincoln Park real estate in Chicago, has been the superintendent for nine years. His knowledge of the cemetery’s history verges on the encyclopedic, but then he admits to sometimes spending as much as 80 hours a week there.
According to Hanley, burials began in 1807, seven years after Congress had moved from Philadelphia to the new capital of Washington. In 1812 a group of private citizens deeded the then-4 1/2-acre cemetery to Christ Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill–a parish established in the 18th Century parish whose flock declined as a result of changing demographics in the 1950s and a hippie interlude in the 1960s.
“The church still owns the land but doesn’t want to do anything with it,” says Hanley. After the War of 1812 the church set aside 100 burial sites for U.S. government officials and in 1823 deeded 300 additional sites to the U.S. Federal funds were used to erect the iron fence, the modest gatekeeper’s house (now Hanley’s office), and the brick vault that temporarily housed the corpses of such worthies as Dolley Madison and Presidents William Henry Harrison, John Quincy Adams and Zachary Taylor.
In 1939 the War Department, then charged with the maintenance of Arlington cemetery and briefly with that of Congressional Cemetery, stated in a report that Congressional “was the first national cemetery created by the government.” Nevertheless, Hanley emphasizes, the cemetery still remains in private hands.
The elements have obscured many of the epitaphs on the older stones. Sometimes they provide wrenching glimpses of long-forgotten lives, and Hanley says he is emotionally touched by their messages.
“Thy memory to me is as the dew is to the rose,” reads one of his favorites that is dedicated to a husband and father who died, possibly fighting Indians, while stationed at a military post in Missouri. Another side of the same tombstone records the death of his young son two days before.
In his rounds of the cemetery with visitors, Hanley fleshes out a number of the notables buried there with anecdotal bits of history:
– Elbridge Gerry, an early advocate of the Colonies’ separation from what he decried as “the prostituted government of Great Britain.” A signer of the Declaration of Independence, he was James Madison’s vice president when he died in 1814. His name survives in the term “gerrymander,” which was coined when he was Massachusetts governor and his Republican supporters sought to bolster their chances at the polls by redrawing state Senate districts to their advantage. Gerry abhorred the practice, but nevertheless considered it constitutional.
– Belva Lockwood, the first female candidate for president to receive votes and who ran under the banner of the National Equal Rights Party in 1884 and 1888. She came to Washington after the Civil War, studied law and became the first woman admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. She also helped secure equal property rights for women in the District of Columbia and prepared amendments providing women’s suffrage in the statehood bills for Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico.
– Two other presidential wannabes, Jacob Broom, the Native American Party candidate in 1852, and William Wirt, the Anti-Masonic candidate in 1832.
– Push-ma-ta-ha, the Choctaw Indian chief and brigadier general who fought with Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. He died while on a mission to Washington in 1824, having uttered as his final words, “let the big guns be fired over me.” Jackson led the chief’s mile-long cortege.
The cemetery’s Indian graves attract scores of Native American visitors. In recent years the American Indian Society placed a carved stone head of an Indian chief at the grave of Taza, the son of Apache chief Cochise.
Hanley says Taza came to the capital in 1876 with a group of tribesmen who had paid their travel expenses by performing in carnival side shows. After he died of pneumonia, Taza received a funeral fit for a chief: a two-hour service and a trip to the cemetery in a glass-sided coach.
Hanley points out the graves of such prominent Washingtonians as Civil War photojournalist Mathew Brady, “March King” John Philip Sousa, legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and architect Robert Mills, who designed the Washington Monument, the Treasury Building and the old Patent Office, now the home of the National Collection of Fine Arts.
Many Revolutionary War soldiers are interred in the cemetery, as are Confederate prisoners of war and 21 women killed in a Civil War explosion at the nearby Navy arsenal in 1864.
A small crowd gathered on Memorial Day for a special observance at the grave of Leonard Matlovich, the former Air Force sergeant who was discharged in 1975 for publicly declaring his homosexuality. He died in 1988.
Matlovich’s polished black granite tombstone, with two pink triangle insets, is inscribed with a personal message: “When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”
Burials have dropped off in the last half century–18 last year and probably no more than 25 by the end of this year, Hanley estimates. He notes that lots are still available for $1,250 apiece.
Strange inhabitants?
Some people say they have heard children’s voices near what was once a favorite monument of visitors: a lifelike statue of Marion Kahlert enclosed in a glass globe. In 1904, Kahlert, then 10, became the city’s first motor-vehicle fatality.
Several years ago vandals toppled the globe and statue, leaving only her shoes on the tombstone. Hanley has placed the broken pieces in a vault for restoration.
Cemeteries are usually associated with loss and grieving, but Hanley says some couples have nevertheless chosen Congressional’s tiny chapel, a turn-of-the-century Gothic structure, for their weddings.
Near the chapel, Hanley says, he and others have encountered a resident ghost.
He remembers seeing her late one night–“a strange woman dressed in a canvas rain slicker, carrying a lantern and shouting at me to get off her land, once the site of a colonial farm.”
So far even the dogs have failed to evict her. PHOTO: The Congressional Cemetery tomb of John Philip Sousa provides a sunny spot where a dog owner and her pet can relax.
