It was on this day in 1881 that President James Garfield finally succumbed to wounds sustained on July 2. Charles Guiteau shot President Garfield while he was walking through a train station in Washington, D.C. The president survived the attack but infection set into the wound and he lingered, suffering, until his death in September. Garfield’s funeral monument is a grand structure in Lake View Cemetery that enshrines the dead president in an almost chapel-like setting, an interesting melding of the sacred and the secular. It is a tribute to a leader of a nation that espouses the separate of church and state as an ideal but borrows heavily from religious art and architecture.
The facade is decorated with 5 reliefs of Garfield.
Only a small section of the interior is open to the public: a center hall that sits above the crypt. A larger-than-life statue of Garfield stands under the dome of a rotunda, decorated by mosaics and stained glass.
A Grave Concern 