In 1824 a miraculous cure is said to have occurred in Washington, which resulted in a wave of conversions to Catholicism by genteel Protestant women. One of these was the young widow, Susan Decatur, who had withdrawn from society and devoted her life to charity. When Georgetown College was in sore need, she advanced $7000––the equivalent of three million dollars today. Her good deed was also a sound investment: each year Georgetown paid her $630, and this continued for many years after the original sum had been repaid. Decatur lived out her days in a cottage on the college campus, and when she died in 1860, at age 84, she was laid to rest––just steps from where she resided––in the College Ground, one of several cemeteries that served Georgetown’s Holy Trinity Church. As neither her late husband’s family nor her own had approved of her conversion to Catholicism, it is unlikely that she would have been welcome in their cemeteries. (Susan Decatur’s tombstone is said to have read June 21, 1860, but p.106 Death Register (Deaths, Holy Trinity Church – Beginning 8th of December 1818, Holy Trinity Church Archives) says July 1860, but gives no day. William W. Warner, At Peace With All Their Neighbors: Catholics and Catholicism in the National Capital 1787-1960)

A history buff seeking to visit this grave will be disappointed: in 1953 Georgetown University removed the College Ground to make way for future expansion. The public was given to understand that parish records listed exactly one hundred and eighty-nine persons buried there. How this number was arrived at is anybody’s guess: the College Ground was the only parish cemetery available between 1818 and 1833, and according to the death register of Holy Trinity, about nine hundred parishioners died in those years. As burials in the College Ground continued for decades after that, the total number of dead is likely to be nearer to a thousand. The transfer of remains from the College Ground to a mass grave in Mount Olivet Cemetery, however, consisted of just "fifty bodies, more or less". (Deaths, Holy Trinity Church – Beginning 8th of December 1818, Holy Trinity Church Archives; Interments, Mount Olivet Cemetery)

Ninety-five percent of the people buried on the campus may have become landfill, but the former benefactress of Georgetown University was quietly moved to Holy Rood Cemetery. This disposition was apparently satisfactory for the next three decades, during which time Susan Decatur’s grave was that cemetery’s most historically significant one. It was not until thirty years later, when Georgetown University began to pursue commercial development of Holy Rood and the need to foresee and deal with potential repercussions began to be felt, that Decatur’s presence in that cemetery came to be regretted. The solution took several more years to work out. In 1988, Susan Decatur was exhumed yet again, and buried for a third time, at the foot of the tomb of her husband, in Philadelphia, to lie beside her Protestant in-laws.

Georgetown University’s Vice President for Administration, Charles Meng, was in attendance that day to express his satisfaction at having brought about this reunion in death, and to inform the Philadelphia Inquirer––the Washington Post had not been notified of his good deed––that Susan Decatur’s previous residence had been neither “notable nor beautiful”. That the person in charge of Holy Rood’s maintenance also happened to be in charge of closing it down––or that he had just removed its most notable grave in furtherance of that end––was left unsaid. (”Reunited, A Naval Hero And His Belle” Philadelphia Inquirer (May 30, 1988); Address of Charles Meng, Vice President for Administration, Georgetown University, on the occasion of the internment [sic] of Susan Wheeler Decatur at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Memorial Day, May 30,1988, Georgetown University Archives)

Carlton Fletcher

(The information in this article originally appeared in the Glover Park Gazette in January, 2003. All rights reserved.)

Holy Rood Cemetery I - origin, Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown
Holy Rood Cemetery II - transfer to the Archdiocese of Washington, 1942
Holy Rood Cemetery III - no room at the inn & digging up the dead, 1984
Joseph Nevitt - Minuteman & revolutionary war veteran
Slave Burials - for those too poor to even own themselves
The Unquiet Grave of Susan Decatur - converted to Cathaloicism, buried on Georgetown University grounds, relocated to Holy Rood and then exhumed and buried a third and final time in Philadelphia. The other 900 bodies originally buried with her on the Georgetown campus are landfill somewhere.
Union Veterans
Confederate Veterans