At the very point of giving up the quest for Brumidi’s grave I called
all the old burial grounds in the District and asked that they search
their records for a Brumidi burial in 1880. Glenwood Cemetery in
Northeast Washington soon reported that Constantino Brumidi was recorded
to have been buried there on February 21, 1880, in Lot 70, site 6.
On my first visit to the old section of Glenwood Cemetery I searched out
Lot 70. It was surrounded by an iron fence bearing the name _Germon_,
1877, on a sagging gate. There was no marker on site 6, to indicate the
burial place of Brumidi. It seemed clear to me that Lola Germon must
have buried her artist husband in the old family burial plot since two
small white stones, on sites 1 and 2 of Lot 70, evidently marked the
burial places of Lola’s father and mother, the father having been buried
there in 1855 and the mother some twenty years later.
As I looked upon Brumidi’s unmarked grave, the unknown grave of the
artist who spent his last twenty-five years decorating the Capitol
Building of the United States, I decided that sometime I would paint the
little white-washed iron fence around Lot 70 as my personal tribute to
those twenty-five Brumidi years. Several years went by. It was the
spring of 1946 before I began painting the iron fence.
On my first painting day, as I labored, weaving highly colored fiction
about the beautiful American girl and the romantic old artist, three
times her age, I was startled by a young voice directly behind me which
excitedly asked, “Why are you painting the fence around this Cemetery
Lot?”
I turned to find a lovely girl watching my efforts with deep concern. I
was so startled as to be unable to give any logical reason for painting
an old fence partly hidden by poison ivy in the oldest corner of an old
cemetery, so I asked the young visitor this question, “Why are you
interested?” She replied quickly and firmly, “I have a right to know.”
Soon I found myself telling this girl the whole story of Brumidi and his
unmarked burial place. She listened with an unbelievable concern and
then launched forth with a story of her own that so far outmatched mine
as to appear at first a bit of imaginative make-believe. Said she:
“All my life I have heard my people talk about this artist, Brumidi, and
it seems that I have always known he was buried inside this little iron
fence. His unmarked grave has had a strange fascination for me, ever
since childhood. Every time I pass the cemetery in a street car I look
over at this little iron fence on the hillside and think about this
forgotten grave that means so much to me.
“As I was riding past today, wondering if I would forever be the only
one interested in the lonesome little Brumidi fence, I suddenly thought
I saw a woman painting that very fence. I kept telling myself it was not
true, that I must have imagined such an unheard-of thing, and all the
time my street car carried me farther and farther away. Finally, unable
to stand the suspense any longer I got off the car, took a trolley
back--and here I am--and there you are--,” and she stopped for breath.
Sensing my completely mystified expressions, she added, “You see, it was
my great-grand aunt, Lola Germon, who modeled for the Capitol Madonnas
and later married Brumidi.”
I went home with Lola Germon’s great-grandniece, Mildred Thompson, and
met the Thompson family. Mildred’s mother slightly doubted my sanity for
painting a cemetery fence belonging to a stranger but presently she laid
before me a deed to the cemetery lot and a family album given to her by
Lola Germon. Mrs. Thompson’s cemetery deed had been issued by Glenwood
Cemetery to Eliza A. Germon, Lola’s mother, in 1866 and verified the
cemetery records that show Brumidi as buried in Lot 70, site 6; Laurence
Brumidi in site 4; and Lola Brumidi in site 5. (Only, Lola Germon
Brumidi was Lola Virginia Kirkwood at the time of her death in 1918, and
both she and her third husband, Edward Kirkwood, are buried in site 5.)