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Tennessee Tizzy  President James K. Polk did big things for America, dramatically expanding its borders by annexing Texas and seizing California and the Southwest in a war with Mexico. Achieving undisturbed eternal rest has proved more difficult.  In a proposal that has riled some folks in Tennessee, including a very distant relative of the nation's 11th president, some state lawmakers want to move Polk's body to what would be its fourth resting place in the nearly 170 years since he died of cholera.  The plan is to exhume Polk's remains and those of his wife, Sarah, from their white-columned tomb on the grounds of the state Capitol in Nashville and take them about 50 miles to his father's home, now known as the James K. Polk Home and Museum, in Columbia. A vote on the resolution could come as early as Monday.  Teresa Elam, who says she is a seventh-generation great-niece of the childless Polk, called the whole idea "mortifying." "I got so upset about it because they're going to take these bodies of these fine, wonderful people and bring them down to Columbia and put them on display to make money," she said.  Backers of the resolution, including Sen. Joey Hensley, a Republican whose district includes the museum, have argued that Polk's tomb is in an out-of-the-way spot on the Capitol grounds and that he deserves better. "I think I have been here 14 years and really didn't know, had never visited James K. Polk's tomb," Hensley said.  The curator of the Polk museum, Thomas Price, who also backs the idea, argues that Polk spent a lot of time in Columbia and that museum visitors constantly ask why the former president isn't buried there. "We've been open since 1929," Price said of the museum. "If this were merely a matter of money we probably would have done it 50 years ago."  Polk died in 1849, just three months after leaving the White House, and was originally laid to rest in what is now the Nashville City Cemetery because of an ordinance that said people who died of infectious diseases had to be buried on the outskirts of town within 24 hours. Less than a year later, he was moved to a tomb in the yard of his Nashville mansion, just as he had specified in his will. Then, after his widow's death in the 1890s, the two of them were buried on the Capitol grounds. (The mansion itself was sold to someone outside the family and was then demolished in 1901.  |
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3/24/2017 6:50 pm |
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3/25/2017 9:53 am |
He is one of Americas most under rated Presidents who accomplished so much in just 4 years. He should be left to rest where the original family desired.
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How interesting to see your post. I live in Columbia. I grew up in a family home across the street from the Polk Home that was built on land owned by James K. Polk.
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3/25/2017 7:06 pm |
How interesting to see your post. I live in Columbia. I grew up in a family home across the street from the Polk Home that was built on land owned by James K. Polk.
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3/26/2017 8:51 am |
nice pic
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