Congressional Cemetery  

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The Congressional Cemetery is a historic cemetery located at 1801 E Street, SE, in Washington, D.C., on the bank of the Anacostia River. It is the final resting place of thousands of individuals who helped form the nation and the city of Washington in the early 19th century. Many members of the U.S. Congress who died while Congress was in session are interred at Congressional. Other burials include the early landowners and speculators, the builders and architects of the great buildings of Washington, native American diplomats, mayors of Washington, and hundreds of Civil War veterans. Nineteenth-century Washington, D.C. families unaffiliated with the federal government have also had graves and tombs at the cemetery. In all there are 19 Senators and 71 Representatives buried there. The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 23, 1969.

Founding and history

The Congressional Cemetery was first established by private citizens in 1807 and later given over to Christ Church, which gave it the name Washington Parish Burial Ground. By 1817 sites were set aside for government legislators and officials; this includes cenotaphs for many legislators buried elsewhere. The cenotaphs were designed by Benjamin Latrobe. The Latrobe design consists of a large square block with recessed panels set on a wider plinth and surmounted by a conical point. The design is considered a rare and possibly unique example of Visionary architecture in the United States, of the kind practiced by the 18th-century French visionary architects Etienne-Louis Boullée and Claude Nicolas Ledoux.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Congressional Cemetery" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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