Experience the Best Alexandria History Tours with Gravestone Stories

Col. George Gilpin’s grave was lost for over two centuries until rediscovered through original research and fieldwork in 2024. He was one of Washington’s pallbearers and a trusted member of the President’s inner circle—his story had been waiting in plain sight.

Among Washington’s pallbearers and inner circle members resting in Alexandria’s cemeteries is the man who first addressed him with the title that would define the American presidency. Their stories—and even that of the enslaved chambermaid who witnessed Washington’s final moments—converge in this extraordinary complex.

He was just a teenager aboard Captain Cook’s ship when they became the first Europeans to discover Hawaii—and witnessed Cook’s death on those distant shores. Decades later, this same sailor and his adventurous wife—who had crossed the equator three times—became respected Alexandria merchants. She died just three weeks before him, and together they carried one of history’s greatest exploration stories to their Virginia graves.

A Confederate-aligned banker and steamship pioneer survived one of America’s most famous shipwrecks, sued the U.S. government and won—all while his son’s slave-trading activities inspired the final illegal voyage of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach American shores.

The slave dealer who operated one of Alexandria’s largest slave pens inspired key scenes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin—including the fate of the Edmonson sisters, who were to be sold as “fancy girls” for sexual exploitation, mirroring the novel’s character Emmeline. Joseph Bruin’s Duke Street slave jail held the Pearl fugitives and became evidence in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s follow-up book proving her novel was based on real horrors.

One man experienced history’s most extraordinary coincidence: the Civil War’s first shots rang out in his Yorkshire farm yard at Bull Run, forcing him to flee 120 miles south—only to have Lee surrender to Grant in his Appomattox parlor four years later.

Learning of his uncle’s surrender from newspapers aboard a British merchant ship in the Pacific, this Confederate naval officer helped sail the CSS Shenandoah 17,000 miles to England—making the final surrender of the Civil War in November 1865, seven months after everyone thought it was over.

The Cooper Dynasty: From Boston Harbor to ‘Traitor’s Hill’—a 16-year-old Tea Party rebel’s son rose to become the highest-ranking Confederate general, outranking even Robert E. Lee, only to die in poverty, stripped of citizenship, living in his former slave quarters.

The grandson of George Mason—who refused to sign the Constitution without the Bill of Rights—became the U.S. Senator who authored the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, stripping accused fugitive slaves of jury trials and basic rights. Later, as a Confederate diplomat, he was captured in the Trent Affair, nearly dragging Britain into the Civil War and forcing Lincoln to choose between two wars.

America’s most famous madams—who ran the world’s most luxurious brothel and entertained millionaires, politicians, and royalty—rest quietly in their family plot under their real names, their scandalous empire hidden beneath simple Alexandria gravestones.

When the Knickerbocker Theater’s roof collapsed under record snowfall in 1922, killing 98 people, among the victims were direct descendants of Richard Bland Lee—their family line stretching from Colonial Virginia to one of Washington D.C.’s most horrific disasters.

In 1944, assistant librarian Catherine Cooper Reardon was brutally murdered inside Washington’s National Cathedral. Her killer was captured, convicted in a Supreme Court case, and executed in the electric chair—but she lies buried in Alexandria, far from the sacred space where her life ended.

He sold jewelry to women at Arlington Hall to access America’s most classified codebreaking secrets. His betrayal blinded U.S. intelligence to North Korea’s invasion, costing 33,000 American lives—and the government he betrayed paid for his headstone.