A quest to find the men who made this country...
Over the next period of my life, I intend to involve myself in a series of brief affairs with the American past. It has come to my attention that my love of history can no longer be satisfied by reading alone. I must take it to an adventure. I must meet the men of the epoch, the leaders of history, the shakers of the ground and the rollers in their graves. Graveyards mean so much more than just being a few slabs of stone. They are the legacy, the reflections, the admirations of a life well (or not well) lived. They are they one physical place where we can glimpse beyond into our future, to reflect how we want to be remembered, how we want to be honored, how we could possibly live and end our lives. Thus, I decided I would travel across the country to visit the graves, reinterrments, cenotaphs, etc., of the most well known people in American history. Starting with the signers of the Declaration of Independence, I will quest through history (and through the nation) in search of the dead, and the stories they left behind.
Well, where are they buried?
The simple answer is this: in the ground. The more complex answer is going to take a lot longer and will be a lot harder to answer. There are some places that will be easy to find, large and well-recorded areas of burial, like in Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston. The harder ones to find will be in family graveyards, lost to the countryside or lost to time, lesser known men whose grave sites haven't been well protected, and under documented sites. There is even one man who claims the tumultuous eastern seaboard as his final resting place. But in this quest, I will attempt to find them all.