Origins Of The Tomb Of The Unknowns

[Norm]

By Steve Hendrix November 10 at 7:00 AM

Arlington National Cemetery had never seen a funeral quite like the one that was held the morning of Nov. 11, 1921. The nation’s highest military officers were there, along with congressional leaders, Supreme Court justices, diplomats from around the world and a crowd so huge the president’s car was forced to drive across fields for him to get there in time.

An “homage of a hundred million” was how one breathless headline writer described the unprecedented turnout and a funeral that took up nearly the entire front page of the next day’s Washington Post.

It was a historic honor for one person, although no one in attendance knew who that person was.

Today, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is as solid in the public psyche as its massive marble slabs are heavy on that hallowed ground. The resting place of one “hero known but to God” sits at the center of national remembrance, drawing millions of visitors a year and an annual pilgrimage from the commander in chief.

Before that autumn morning, there had been no such tradition. Monuments to the unnamed dead had always been collective. The original site of Memorial Day ceremonies at Arlington was an enormous ossuary containing bones from 2,111 soldiers gathered from Civil War battlefields.

But the killing technologies of World War I brought new levels of identity-wiping devastation. More than 116,000 Americans were slaughtered, including 1,652 who were too damaged to be identified.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/histo...=.6805b033cc27

[DAB]

the marble came from the Yule quarry in Marble, CO. i've been there when i was a kid, and we picked up some marble scraps from the side of the road up to the quarry (bring a 4x4).

years ago there was talk about replacing the marble with a fresh piece, that didn't have cracks and defects and mistakes, but it went nowhere. they had even identified a new section of marble in the quarry that would be the replacement.