Qualla: Rock Creek Cemetery

Rock Creek Cemetery: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cliff from Arlington, Virginia, USA, CC BY 2.0. Marian Hooper Adams swallowed potassium cyanide in December 1885, leaving her husband Henry Adams - grandson of one president, great-grandson of another - a widower at forty-seven. He grieved by commissioning a monument. He gave the job to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the country's finest sculptor, with the instruction that the figure should suggest the contemplative Buddhist concept of nirvana and should not be allegorical in any obvious way. Stanford White designed the granite setting. What Saint-Gaudens delivered, completed in 1891, is a seated hooded figure of indeterminate gender, eyes half closed, neither man nor woman, neither suffering nor at peace. Adams refused to title it. Visitors called it Grief. Saint-Gaudens himself called it The Mystery of the Hereafter and the Peace of God that Passeth Understanding. It sits in Rock Creek Cemetery, hidden behind a screen of hollies, and it is one of the most powerful things to look at in Washington.

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Image: Cliff from Arlington, Virginia, USA | CC BY 2.0

Rock Creek Cemetery: Older Than the District

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cliff from Arlington, Virginia, USA, CC BY 2.0. Rock Creek Cemetery predates the city around it by seventy-two years. The churchyard of St. Paul's Episcopal Church was established in 1719, when this rolling land north of the Potomac was still part of colonial Maryland. When Washington was carved from Maryland and Virginia in 1...

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Image: Cliff from Arlington, Virginia, USA | CC BY 2.0

Rock Creek Cemetery: The Adams Memorial

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Astrochemist, CC BY-SA 3.0. If the cemetery has a single reason to visit it, the Adams Memorial is it. Saint-Gaudens spent three years on the figure, refining the drapery and the half-closed eyes until what he produced was almost not a portrait at all but a kind of held breath in bronze. Henry Adams, who re...

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Image: Astrochemist | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rock Creek Cemetery: A Catalog of Americans

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Masterpiggy5, CC BY-SA 4.0. The headstones nearby read like an annotated index of American history. John Marshall Harlan, the 'Great Dissenter,' wrote the lone opinion against Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 - the case that approved 'separate but equal.' He is buried here, sixty years before Brown v. Board of Ed...

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Image: Masterpiggy5 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rock Creek Cemetery: Inventors, Writers, Newscasters

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Astrochemist at en.wikipedia, Public domain. Emile Berliner, the German immigrant who invented the gramophone and patented the disc record in 1887, lies among the same oaks as Charles Francis Jenkins, an American pioneer of motion-picture projection and television. Alice Roosevelt Longworth - Theodore Roosevelt's eldest, th...

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Image: Astrochemist at en.wikipedia | Public domain

Rock Creek Cemetery: A Garden of Bronze

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Astrochemist, Public domain. Beyond the Adams Memorial, the cemetery is a sculpture park of unusual depth. Gutzon Borglum - the man who would later carve Mount Rushmore - made Rabboni in 1909, a bronze of the resurrection scene at the empty tomb. James Earle Fraser, designer of the Buffalo nickel, made the F...

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Image: Astrochemist | Public domain