Where Are They Buried? (93 page)

DECEMBER 5, 1839 – JUNE 25, 1876

After graduating last in his West Point class, George Custer surprised his mentors and established a reputation as a hard-fighting (if flamboyant) officer in the Union cavalry. Throughout the Civil War, he led his men in nearly every battle fought by the Army of the Potomac and, by battlefield commission, attained the rank of General.

After the war ended, though, Custer was busted back down to his regular rank of Lieutenant Colonel, and as commander of the 7th Calvary was charged with bringing renegade Sioux tribes back to their reservation. One fine summer day, upon discovering an Indian camp along Montana’s Little Bighorn River, Custer divided his regiment into three columns in an effort to surround the camp and cut off the Indians’ escape route. But unfortunately, the Indians didn’t stick to the script and Custer and his column of 267 men were annihilated. He was dead at 36.

Three days later the bodies were given a hasty battlefield burial, and the following year what may have been Custer’s remains were disinterred, given a military funeral, and reinterred in the Post Cemetery at the West Point Military Academy in New York.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Since September 11, 2001, we’ve lost some of the privileges we’ve enjoyed as American citizens, and many will surely never return. One such privilege is our admission to many government and military installations, including West Point Academy. The Academy’s visitor’s center used to offer a two-hour tour of its grounds, which included a visit to Post Cemetery. But that tour has been discontinued, citing security concerns. A one-hour tour is still offered, but the Post Cemetery visit is not included in that tour. Whether the two-hour tour will ever be offered again is anyone’s guess.

So, until further notice, it’s impossible to visit Custer’s grave unless you have clearance. (I’d wager that it wouldn’t hurt if you happened to be a senator’s son.) This author visited Custer’s grave before September 11, and it really is worth seeing. His stone is emblazoned with a large bronze plaque that details his life accomplishments, and the monument is adorned with enormous buffalo heads on either side. For now, I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Still, the visitor center is definitely worth your time. From I-84 take Exit 10S, follow Route 9W south for 15½ miles, then turn at the second West Point exit. Or, from I-287, take Exit 11, follow Route 9W north for 21 miles, then turn at the first West Point exit. In either case, you’ll then proceed one mile, bear right at the “Y,” and find the visitor center a half-mile ahead on the right.

Finally, the Little Bighorn Battlefield is now a national monument and is also worth a visit the next time you happen to be hanging around Crow Agency, Montana.

FEBRUARY 12, 1809 – APRIL 19, 1882

In 1859 Charles Darwin defined his theory of organic evolution in his book
Origin of the Species
, and in one fell swoop became both a well-respected and much-reviled figure. His theory of evolution is considered to be contrary to some biblical teachings and destructive to religion so, with his book’s publication, Darwin sparked a controversy that still rages today.

But contrary to popular belief, Darwin was not the first person to propose evolution. In scientific circles it was widely discussed long before Darwin published his theory. Rather, the question was,
how
did evolution occur? Darwin proposed a viable mechanism for evolution (natural selection), and here’s how it works: Individuals born with certain beneficial characteristics enjoy an advantage over their peers, and their offspring enjoy the same advantages.
Over time, the individuals with the advantageous characteristics do better, live longer, and produce more offspring until eventually, the population looks very different from its original version. In other words, new species arise when the environment favors certain characteristics over others.

What sounds fairly simple was quite controversial, and it remains so today, due in part to the erroneous simplification that natural selection amounts to man being descended from apes. Still, Darwin stood by his theory and spent the remainder of his life defending it, carefully and methodically working over his copious research notes. He never swayed in the doctrine of his theory, and it is accepted today by scientists worldwide.

After months of chest pains and seizures, Darwin died of heart failure at 73.

Westminster Abbey in London functions as neither a cathedral nor a parish church, but is controlled by the royal crown and has been used as the site for the Royal Coronation since 1066. Burial there is one of the rarest and greatest of British honors, and Darwin was so honored; he rests there in the area known as “Scientist’s Corner.”

His family erected a bronze memorial with a life-sized relief bust near the grave in 1888, but there’s also an interesting sequel to this account. His actual burial place is beneath the flagstone in the center of the north aisle, at the precise spot where exists an ornamental iron screen with a gate and a ticket booth. Darwin’s grave is at this gate, and every one of the thousands of visitors who file past to pay their admission fee steps on his grave.

FEBRUARY 11, 1847 – OCTOBER 18, 1931

But for the internal combustion engine and the airplane, it’s difficult to name any common Industrial Revolution-era invention for which Thomas Edison cannot claim considerable credit or, more likely, the original patent. Having had just three weeks of public schooling and a few years of home schooling by his mother, Edison patented 1,093 inventions, which, in total, revolutionized the fabric of modern civilization.

At 15, he started work as a telegraph operator, which led to his first inventions: the automatic telegraph and the message printer, which in turn led to his new career as full-time inventor. The vote recorder and stock ticker came quickly, and sale of those patents provided funds for Tom’s own invention factory, first in Newark and later in Menlo Park, where a staff of technicians collaborated
on “invention to order.” The vast New Jersey factory was an antecedent of modern research and development laboratories, and over the course of 50 years, churned out ideas that led to the development or improvement of everything from cement plants to plate glass, typewriters to dry-cell batteries, mimeographs to phonographs, and talking motion pictures. He also made a significant discovery in pure science, the “Edison effect” that led to the electron tube and the underlying technology for radio broadcasting, television, and x-rays.

To research incandescence, Edison Electric Light Company (today’s General Electric) was formed, the incandescent light bulb was introduced in 1879, and central municipal power systems under Edison Electric Company soon followed. As consultant to the U.S. Navy during World War I, Tom contributed another 45 inventions, including navigating equipment, ship-to-shore telephones, and defensive systems against U-boats. With Henry Ford and the Firestone Company he developed a process to provide a domestic rubber source, which, in 1930, proved to be his last patent.

At 84 he died from complications of diabetes and is buried behind his home, Glenmont House, in West Orange, New Jersey. The home is now part of the Edison National Historic Site, which also includes the Edison Laboratory Museum where, among other memorabilia, you can peruse some of his 3,400 notebooks containing records of his ideas and research. The Historic Site is easy to find from Interstate 280. If traveling from the west take Exit 9, and if from the east take Exit 10, then follow the signs.

Even more of Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory and equipment are preserved at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

MARCH 14, 1879 – APRIL 18, 1955

To avoid compulsory military service, the German-born Albert Einstein gained Swiss citizenship and found employment there at a patent office. In 1905, working alone without the benefit of scientific literature or colleagues, he released a series of theoretical physics publications. Particularly astonishing among these was a paper on the theory of relativity, which, if correct, would overturn classical physics and set the scientific community on its head.

Basing his new theory on a reinterpretation of the classical principle of relativity, namely that the laws of physics had to have the same form in any frame of reference, and dismissing the
traditional notion that time and space were absolute concepts, “special relativity” suggested instead that both time and space vary with circumstances; it was the speed of light that remained constant in all frames of reference.

Over the next decade, Einstein perfected his general theory of relativity and summed it up with the famous equation,
E=mc
²
. Further, he predicted how a ray of light from a distant star, passing near the sun, would appear to be slightly bent in the direction of the sun. When this prediction was verified by the Royal Society of London, essentially proving relativity and overthrowing Newtonian physics, Einstein earned the international acclaim he deserved.

A confirmed giant of science, Einstein spent the remainder of his life working toward a “grand unified theory of physics” that would integrate the properties of gravity, matter, and energy into a single, universal formula. His quest was unfulfilled however, and continues to elude the best minds still.

In 1932 he accepted a post at Princeton University and in 1940 became a United States citizen. In a letter he later regarded as his life’s biggest mistake, Einstein urged President Roosevelt to step up nuclear fission research, and though he played no direct part in the development of the atomic bomb, his name has been inextricably linked to the atomic age.

After the war, Einstein threw himself into political activism and joined other scientists in efforts to prevent the use of atomic weapons, including a proposal for the establishment of a world government system that would provide “the binding authority necessary for world security.”

Albert Einstein died at 76 in his sleep. He was cremated the same day and his ashes scattered in New Jersey’s Delaware River.

JULY 2, 1925 – JUNE 12, 1963

Medgar Evers grew up in the Deep South during the Depression, and as soon as he turned eighteen, like many others of that era, promptly joined the Army. In 1944 he found himself on the beaches of Normandy, but little did he know that the biggest battle of his life was yet to be fought.

In 1954 Medgar decided to make a difference in the growing civil rights movement and in a short while was made Mississippi’s first NAACP field secretary. The next years found him organizing voter-registration drives and, at times, boycotts in areas where the local populace was most obstinate. During the early 1960s the
increased tempo of desegregation activities in the South created high and constant tensions, and the situation routinely reached the breaking point.

One hot night in 1963, President Kennedy made a broadcast on national television describing a bill he was sending to Congress that later became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A few hours later, just after midnight, while stepping out of his Oldsmobile with an armload of “Jim Crow Must Go” tee shirts, Medgar was felled by a shotgun blast fired by an assailant who had lurked in the shadows outside his home. Fifteen minutes later, Medgar died at a local hospital.

At 37, he was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Arlington National Cemetery is on the west side of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. From any of the major highways you can easily follow the signs to the visitor parking lots.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Medgar is buried in Section 36, which is immediately across the drive from the visitor’s center. The graves are arranged numerically, and his grave at Number 1431 is easy to locate.

After Medgar’s death the shotgun that was used to kill him was found in the bushes nearby, with the owner’s fingerprints still fresh on it. Staunch white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith was soon arrested, stating then that, “I didn’t kill the nigra, but he’s gone and he ain’t coming back.” Three decades and three trials later, he was convicted of the murder, though the verdict was tainted by what newspapers called an “O.J. jury,” comprised of eight minorities, three white women, and one white man.

In 2001, suffering from a variety of health problems, Beckwith died in prison at 80. We don’t really care where he’s buried.

JULY 30, 1863 – APRIL 7, 1947

Henry Ford holds credit for the proliferation of the automobile, for better or for worse, but it’s not because be built the first gasoline-powered vehicle (he didn’t), nor is it due to his initiation of the assembly line and interchangeable parts. What really matters is that Henry Ford developed mass consumption. Ford’s vision helped create a middle class, one marked by urbanization,
rising wages, and some free time in which to spend them. If not for his drive to create a mass market for his cars, the American powerhouse economy that emerged, based on the buying power of an enormous middle class more than likely would have developed much less vigorously.

In 1905, when Ford Motor Company had 50 competitors, the conventional wisdom was to build cars for the rich. But Ford recognized that if he were to build an automobile affordable to the common man, and an automotive infrastructure were to develop along with it, the world would beat a path to his door. To that end, Ford streamlined his facilities to produce a simple and reliable car, the Model T. Further, he campaigned in Washington for better roads and pushed for gas stations everywhere.

In 1914 Ford shocked the industrial world by paying his workers a $5-a-day minimum wage that more than doubled the prevailing wage.
The Wall Street Journal
called it an “economic crime,” and his competitors expected that he had just expensed himself out of business; they couldn’t fathom how low Ford had driven his cost per car and that, by making it feasible for more people to buy cars, his high labor costs were insignificant. Ford figured that if he paid his workers a real living wage, everyone would buy a car. And he was right. Within just two years, sales of the Model T increased to 720,000. People flocked to jobs in Ford’s factories—more than 100,000 worked at his gigantic River Rouge plant—and they invariably bought one of his cars. By the time Model T ceased production in 1927, more than 15 million had been sold.