By Brian Lamb

Special to the Chicago Tribune
Sunday, September 22, 2002

This story ought to come with a warning label: Contents best suitable for history buffs. And, we're not talking garden-variety history travelers, drawn to the manicured grounds of Civil War battlefields or the air-conditioned exhibition halls of American history museums. This story will take you on the road to 38 cemeteries, to visit the grave sites of 40 U.S. vice presidents.

Well, 39, actually, but more about that later.

First, a quick sketch of American vice presidents. There have been 46; 40 have gone to their reward; six are with us still. Their average age on taking the oath was 54. The youngest, at 36, was John C. Breckinridge, No. 2 to James Buchanan. Harry S. Truman's running mate, Alben W. Barkley, was the oldest at 71. Seven died in office.

Fourteen, either through election in their own right or through the untimely deaths of their leaders, made it to the Executive Mansion and into the history books. Most of the rest, especially those in the age before television, toiled in relative obscurity in a largely ceremonial job. It seems amazing to us today, but in the days when party bosses selected the tickets, some vice presidents barely knew their president before the election and weren't consulted once in office. Their job was to help the president get elected. Success at that task consigned them to attending funerals and fairs, making speeches and wondering whether history would ever call for them to step forward into the top post.

Driving on U.S. Highway 1 in Maine, on the way to Hannibal Hamlin's grave at Mt. Hope Cemetery in Bangor and halfway through my list of 40 dead vice presidents, it dawned on me how much fun I was having. Not only was I in one of the nation's prettiest and least populated states, but my thoughts were not on the business trip I had just left, but on the politics of the United States, circa 1860. For a history junkie, this is the travel equivalent of nirvana.

Here's what I'd learned about Hamlin: He was a Democratic senator from Maine who'd left the party in protest over slavery to join the new Republican Party. His defection brought him national attention, and when Republican party leaders were casting about for a vice presidential candidate in 1860, this northeastern former Democrat seemed a good balance to Abraham Lincoln, the former Whig from the West. Knowing that the office was largely ceremonial, Hamlin didn't want the vice presidential nod. He learned that he'd been selected for the ballot only after party members sought him out in his hotel room, interrupting a card game. He never met Lincoln until after the election.

Four years later, hoping to increase his chances for re-election in the midst of war, Lincoln dumped him in favor of a pro-Union Southern Democrat named Andrew Johnson, from the key border state of Tennessee. Hamlin returned to the Senate for two more terms, while just six weeks after his second inauguration, Lincoln's assassination put Johnson in the White House.

What kind of tourist seeks out goal-oriented travel? Maybe it's a male thing. Or, perhaps I've been influenced by a bunch of like-minded friends. A longtime colleague, Brian Lockman, has visited every major league baseball park. An Indianapolis friend, Jim Poole, made it to each county seat in his home state. Achieving a goal of my own appealed to me, but until presidential historian Richard Norton Smith told me about his just-completed tour of presidential grave sites I hadn't found my own hook—history. Taking on a grave site tour personalized American history and gave me specific incentives to keep learning.

My first round of political grave sites was the presidents, out of that came a guidebook called "Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?" Once that tour was finished, I was looking for a new goal. Tackling the vice presidents was not only a natural, it let me begin the list with 12 grave sites under my belt (two of the 14 Veeps-turned-president—Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush—are, of course, still alive). Besides, being wonkishly competitive, it would put me a step ahead of my old friend Smith, the presidential historian.

Once you've visited a few political graves, you begin to realize how much thought famous people and their families put into posterity. They clearly want you to visit, a fact underscored by funerary designs that attempt to reflect the best qualities of the person interred. Evolving burial practices also offer an interesting timeline through our society, as customs changed from the simple graves of the post-colonial era, to the Victorians' grand memorials, to the post-modern minimalists who favor slabs of glossily polished granite.

Epitaphs are key. My vice presidential favorite is probably Hubert H. Humphrey's at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis. It says, "I have enjoyed my life, its disappointments outweighed by its pleasures. I have loved my country in a way that some people consider sentimental and out of style. I still do, and I remain an optimist, with joy, without apology, about this country and about the American experiment in democracy."

Here's a tip if you're inspired to start your own historic grave site travel: Make it a longer-term goal, something you do over time. The stops are far-flung—20 states and the District of Columbia have vice presidential burial sites—and sometimes they are simply not on the way to anywhere. John Nance Garner, nicknamed "Cactus Jack," who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's vice president for the first eight years is buried in his hometown of Uvalde in south central Texas, 60 miles from San Antonio. More remote is the grave of William A. Wheeler (Rutherford B. Hayes' vice president) in the upper reaches of New York State, near the Canadian border.

Because I travel a lot for business, it was most convenient to add a leg here or there to business trips. Occasionally, I'd create a circuit of relatively close-by grave sites and turn that into a short driving vacation. These more leisurely trips allowed time to visit other historic sites along the way.

Chicagoans can sample a VP grave site tour without leaving town. Charles G. Dawes, Calvin Coolidge's vice president and winner of the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize, is buried at Rosehill Cemetery (5800 N. Ravenswood Ave.), Chicago's largest burial grounds. Once you have pinpointed Dawes' mausoleum, be sure to check out the cemetery's 350 acres, which have some impressive tenants.

A few hours south on Interstate Highway 55, in the city of Bloomington, is Illinois' other vice presidential grave, that of Adlai E. Stevenson, grandfather to the twice unsuccessful presidential candidate of the same name. The two Adlais are buried across from one another in Evergreen Memorial Cemetery. The senior Adlai was Grover Cleveland's vice president from 1893 to 1897 and made a second bid for the job in 1900, when he teamed with the great orator and gold-standard activist William Jennings Bryan. Bloomington is deep in Lincoln country, so while you're at the cemetery, visit the burial site of one of Lincoln's Supreme Court appointees, David Davis.

A few hours to the east of Bloomington, lies Indianapolis. If Virginia is the birthplace of presidents, Indiana is a mother lode of vice presidents. Five hail from the state, including the very much alive J. Danforth Quayle. Three are buried in the capital city's Crown Hill Cemetery: Charles W. Fairbanks, who gave his name to the Alaskan city, was Theodore Roosevelt's vice president from 1905 to 1909. His personality must have been the mirror opposite of the brash Roosevelt's; during the 1904 campaign, Roosevelt and Fairbanks were tagged as "the Hot Tamale and the Indiana Icicle." As a fellow Hoosier, I'm betting it wasn't frostiness that marked Fairbanks' personality, just a classic case of Indiana reserve. Thomas R. Marshall, the man who reportedly gave us the maxim 'What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar," served under President Woodrow Wilson, and is another of Crown Hill's eternal residents. The third vice presidential internment is Grover Cleveland's first running mate, Thomas A. Hendricks, who had an unlucky history with the vice presidency. His first try for the office was with Democrat Samuel Tilden in 1876; the ticket was vanquished during the infamous Hayes-Tilden electoral battle, when a Republican-dominated commission gave the election to their man, Rutherford B. Hayes. Hendricks picked a winner in Grover Cleveland, and then died in office just eight months after the 1885 inauguration.

Opened in 1864, Crown Hill bills itself as the third-largest non-governmental cemetery in the United States and is a bonanza for graveyard tourists. A few names among the 185,000 departed who caught my attention are President Benjamin Harrison, the notorious bank robber John Dillinger, Richard Gatling (inventor of the Gatling gun), Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley and the graves of 1,600 Confederate POWs.

New York state is the final resting placefor 10 vice presidents. There's a good political reason for this: In the earliest days of the country, politicians from powerful New York state were often drafted for the No. 2 spot to balance the Virginia presidential dynasty.

Although only one vice president is buried in New York City itself, six other vice presidents are buried within a 90-minute drive of the city (including two in New Jersey), making the greater New York City area especially fruitful in the hunt for vice presidential graves.

In the city's East Village area, you'll find James Monroe's vice president, Daniel D. Tompkins, buried in the churchyard at St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery. There is a statue of him, as well, quite a tribute to a politician who drank too much and was accused of mismanaging state funds as New York's governor. After his death at the age of 50, Congress voted to pay off his debts.

In the close-in part of Long Island, an easy drive from LaGuardia Airport, you can find Theodore Roosevelt's grave site, just down the road from Sagamore Hill, his National Park Service-preserved home in Oyster Bay. In 1900, Republican Party leaders pickedhim to run with William McKinley as he campaigned for re-election, hoping to send the young, publicity-seeking reformist governor of New York into the vice presidency's political oblivion. Fate had other plans. Just 186days after McKinley's second inauguration, a crazed anarchist named Leon Czolgosz shot the president at close range; McKinley's death eight days later put Roosevelt into the White House at the tender age of 42. He became the nation's 26th president; 26 steps now lead to his grave.

McKinley's first vice president was Garret A. Hobart, who died in office. His burial place is also within commuting distance of New York City, in Patterson, N.J. About 40 minutes farther south, in Princeton, is New Jersey's other vice presidential grave, that of Aaron Burr. While in office, he dueled with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton; when Hamilton died, Burr went on the lam. His grave is marked with a plain stone.

Three vice presidents are marking eternity just up the Hudson River from New York. In the leafy Dutchess County town of Rhinebeck is the grave of Levi P. Morton, vice president under Benjamin Harrison. In his time, he was a major banker and financier, a contemporary of J.P. Morgan. Harrison replaced him on his losing ticket in 1892. Four years later, Morton made his own bid for the White House, but lost the nomination to William McKinley and returned to banking.

Across the river in Kingston, just about 15 miles away, is the burial site of George Clinton. This long-time New York governor served as Thomas Jefferson's second vice president and James Monroe's first, dying in office.

And just outside New York City on the Hudson River in picturesque Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., is that 40th grave site, the last one on my list, which I was simply unable to conquer. It is the final resting place of Nelson A. Rockefeller, the four-term New York governor who sought the presidency three times and was appointed vice president by Gerald R. Ford in the rocky days after Watergate. Two years after leaving office, he died in New York City of a massive heart attack. He's the only vice president to be cremated.

His plot, along with other famous members of the Rockefeller family, is in a private gated area of a cemetery in Sleepy Hollow. Despite numerous attempts to visit, including a personal letter of request to Nelson's widow, Happy, the grave site remained off limits. Rockefeller, who was influential enough to lend his name to a branch of Republicanism ("the Rockefeller Republicans"), is the only person to serve as president or vice president whose grave site is not accessible to the public.

Finding any vice president's final resting place is made easy today with the Internet (see sidebar). Detailed research materials are available on the least known, men such as Schuyler Colfax, who served under Ulysses S. Grant; Richard Mentor Johnson, vice president to Martin Van Buren; or George Mifflin Dallas, for whom the Texas city was named. A Philadelphian on the ticket with James K. Polk, Dallas' grave is in Philadelphia's St. Peter's Churchyard, a National Historic Landmark, located on Pine Street in the city's historic district. While visiting Dallas' tomb, I paid my respects to the great portrait painter Charles Wilson Peale and saw the graves of eight Indian chiefs who contracted smallpox while in Philadelphia—then the capital—on an official visit to President George Washington.

One of the hardest sites to find is the grave of Spiro T. Agnew, who resigned the vice presidency in disgrace in 1973, just 10 months before his president, Richard M. Nixon, resigned over the Watergate investigation. You have to search the grounds of the Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens in Timonium, Md., to spot the small, understated marker that bears his name.

If you find it, perhaps you're ready to advance to Political Graveyards 301—tracking down the 51 deceased speakers of the House, the 15 dead chief justices, or if you're really hooked, all 101 departed justices of the Supreme Court.