Found a Grave

Do you remember how excited I was about the web-site www.findagrave.com?  Well, Quack School Niece has become an actual Grave Finder!  Here is an exciting (well…you know what I mean) grave she found today on her lunch hour.

This is the William Thomas Carroll mausoleum.  Who the heck was William Thomas Carroll you are probably wondering.  Here is the story.

William Wallace Lincoln (Willie) was Abraham and Mary Todd’s third son (His older brother Eddie had died 10 months before Willie was born.  Robert, the Lincoln’s first child, was the only Lincoln son to live into adulthood).  Abraham was especially close to Willie.  Willie died at the White House during Abraham’s first term, probably of typhoid fever when he was 11 years old.  Abraham was grief stricken.  The Lincolns had no place to bury poor little Willie in Washington D.C.  William Thomas Carroll, a clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court offered the Lincoln family use of the family tomb in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington.  It was said that Abraham would spend long hours sitting in the tomb grieving over the loss of his young son. Contemporary newspaper accounts claim that on at least two occasions he had the crypt opened so he could sit and stare at the remains of his dead son, whom he could not bear to leave alone in the darkness of the stone tomb.

More exciting graves to come!