No, this is not a “who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?” trick question. Sir James Tillie left such unusual instructions on the disposition of his mortal remains that after his death his servants were forced to improvise. No documentation of what they did has survived, so the location of Sir James’ body has been a mystery since the early 18th century.

James Tillie was born on November 16th, 1645. His early years are also shrouded in mystery, both because there isn’t much to be found in the historical record and because what there is to be found relies heavily on his own claims, and he was a notorious liar. He came from humble circumstances, we know that much. According to this print he commissioned of himself the year he was knighted, he was born at Winfield, presumably a town in England, and educated at the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple in London, at that time a law school and still today one of the four professional associations that is entitled to make their members official barristers.

Who knows if he really attended the Middle Temple (probably not), but we do know that by the 1680s, he had managed to garner an excellent position as land agent to Sir John Coryton, a baronet and member of parliament who owned the large estate of Newton Ferrers in the Tamar Valley of Cornwall. He made a lucrative business of it by God knows what shady means, and in 1687 Tillie bought himself a knighthood from King James II. Apparently he misrepresented himself so massively that King James later launched an investigation into Tillie’s knighthood and coat of arms on suspicion that he had secured the “favour of knighthood” under false pretenses. Luckily for Sir James, King James’ days on the throne were numbered. He fled and was replaced by William of Orange and Mary Stuart (King James’ daughter) in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Two years later, someone else’s misfortune turned out to be another great stroke of luck for Sir James Tillie. His patron, Sir Coryton, died in 1690 at the early age of 42. His death was agonizing, sudden and highly suspicious. There were rumors that he had been poisoned, possibly by Sir James, possibly by Sir James and Sir John’s 37-year-old wife Elizabeth Chiverton, the wealthy daughter of a former Mayor of London. Even before Sir John’s death, the buzz in the valley was that Sir James and Elizabeth were altogether too chummy. Tillie married the widowed Elizabeth shortly thereafter, which didn’t exactly allay suspicions, especially since Sir John had died without a surviving male heir, leaving his estate to his wife.

Sir James was now considerably wealthier than he had been and with an estate courtesy of his wife that encompassed a good part of the Tamar Valley. Next on the arriviste checklist was building himself a stately home. He divided the Newton Ferrers estate and took a chunk of it for his new digs. Construction on Pentillie was completed in 1698.

He had only 15 years to enjoy it. Sir James Tillie died childless but with a quiverfull of ego on November 17th, 1713. Convinced that this whole death thing wouldn’t last for him, he ordered that a three-story mausoleum be built on the highest hill of his estate, Mount Ararat. With beautiful views of his mansion and the bend in the River Tamar, his mausoleum was not to be his burial site, but rather a picturesque place for his body to wait for his resurrection. He expected this to happen within two years, so he instructed that his body be dressed in his finest silks and brocades, his head adorned with his zazziest peruke and finest hat, and that he be placed in a throne-like chair with his hands on his knees. He was to be secured to this chair with iron bands and the chair placed facing the window. Next to him would be an oak chest of his favorite books, port and pipe.

His servants fulfilled his wishes. Sir James sat clamped to his chair, rotting away, for the next two years. The mausoleum roof rotted with him. When the expected time of resurrection had come and gone, his staff finally decided that the decayed corpse of Sir James Tillie really should be buried instead of being left exposed to the elements. Where they buried him we don’t know. They could have buried him in the mausoleum itself, or in the cemetery of the parish church of St. Mellion where the Corytons were buried. There is no marker to be found nor surviving documentation. A limestone statue of Sir James Tillie sitting in his chair was erected in the same place where the original had sat.

Tillie left Pentillie to his nephew, James Woolley. Woolley, who changed his name to Tillie for the inheritance, left it to his son James who in turn left it to his daughter Mary Jemima Tillie who, in an appropriate historical twist, married Peter Coryton, heir to Newton Ferrers. They reunited the estate Sir James had divided after possibly killing a Coryton to get it, and thereafter Pentillie became the seat of the Coryton family.

The family did very well, increasing their holdings to more than 20,000 acres, and in 1809 decided it was time to make Pentillie a proper castle to reflect their prosperity. They hired landscape designer Humphry Repton, known as the intellectual heir to Capability Brown, to design a new look for the grounds and home. Architect William Wilkins, famed for his neo-classical Palladian style buildings at first and then for his neo-Gothic creations, implemented Repton’s plans in 1810, adding three wings to the house and transforming it into a full-on Gothic castle.

It seems that around this time they also altered the mausoleum, adding a plinth around the base of it and putting another story on top. That would explain why Sir James’ statue is now on the ground floor when early accounts described his body as sitting on the first floor.

In 1968, the mausoleum was listed as a Grade II* building, i.e., a particularly important building of more than special interest. Despite its importance and special interest, the mausoleum was not maintained well. It was already crumbling just a few years after it was built, and its decay was not halted by any of the alterations that may have been made in the 1810 expansion.

Pentillie itself, its Gothic additions demolished between 1966 and 1968 right before it too was listed and a new home built around the core, was in dire condition. Its reclusive owner from 1980 to 2007 shut herself in and went full Miss Havisham, only allowing a handful of servants access to the home or grounds. Neither the heirs, who lived on a nearby farm, nor construction workers were allowed to step foot on the property. It wasn’t until her death in September of 2007 that the current owners, Ted and Sarah Coryton, fell in love with the place and decided to open it up to events and B&B guests to fund the vast repairs it needed.

Last year, the Corytons, English Heritage, Natural England and local conservation officers came together to discuss repairs on the mausoleum. Overgrown with brambles and greenery, the structure was in imminent danger. They worked out a funding arrangement with Natural England and the Country Houses Foundation and a restoration team has now begun exploratory work. The first order of business: see if Sir James is in there somewhere.

To see if there’s a ground floor the plinth was built up around, the restoration team dug a hole in the internal floor of the mausoleum. Underneath they found a brick vaulted roof indicating there is a room under there. Is this where the staff put Sir James’ body to rest? Ted Coryton thinks so, and that his wife/possible poisoning accomplice Elizabeth could be under there too. Restoration is slated to begin in earnest this winter, so we should find out soon if the bones of Sir James Tillie were buried in what is now the mausoleum basement.

Tomorrow, October 14th, 2012, will be the hundredth anniversary of the day Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest and then proceeded to deliver a 90 minute speech to an aghast crowd as blood seeped through his shirt and his breath shortened. Only when he was finished delivering his prepared remarks did he allow his aides to rush him to the hospital.

TR was on the campaign trail in Milwaukee, running for president as a candidate for the Progressive Party. He had already served two terms as President, the first from 1901 to 1905 when he finished William McKinley’s term due to McKinley’s assassination six months after he took office. The second, 1905 to 1909, was his only elected term. He deliberately chose not to run for a third consecutive term in the 1908 election, supporting William Howard Taft over his own Vice President Charles Fairbanks.

Taft won the election, but TR would soon fall out with the successor he had picked. Although Taft prosecuted more trusts than Roosevelt had, as a lawyer and judge he believed any such actions to be the role of the judiciary. Roosevelt was disappointed with what he saw as Taft’s do-nothing administration, and Taft’s conservative rhetoric had little in common with Teddy’s heated defense of the consumer and government by, for and of the people. On a somewhat two-faced note, he also resented the Taft government’s 1911 attempt to break up U.S. Steel, whose purchase of its main competitor Roosevelt had personally approved in 1907.

Theodore Roosevelt thus decided to run again for President in 1912. Things got raw on that campaign trail. Roosevelt called Taft a shill for the bosses and politically corrupt; Taft called him the greatest menace to American instutions. Roosevelt called Taft a “puzzlewit” and Taft called him a “prize honeyfugler,” which I think we can all agree is objectively awesome. Roosevelt won nine out of twelve Republican primaries that spring, but most of the states didn’t hold primaries. Their delegates were assigned at state conventions and caucuses via deals in smoke-filled rooms.

At the Republican National Convention in Chicago in June, the Republican National Committee, controlled by the conservative wing of the party which supported Taft, assigned all disputed delegates to their man. It was mayhem on the convention floor. After all Roosevelt’s attempts to secure more delegates failed, he walked out of the Chicago Coliseum and told his pledged delegates not to vote. In August, he founded the Progressive Party, also known as the Bull Moose Party, and ran for President against Taft, Democratic Party candidate Woodrow Wilson and Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs.

With a four-way race and all these political tectonic plates clashing against each other, the presidential campaign of 1912 was a tense one, to say the least. Enter John Flammang Schrank, a Bavarian immigrant who had moved to the United States when he was 9 years old. His parents died soon thereafter, and he was raised by his aunt and uncle who ran a saloon in New York City’s Lower East Side.

In 1904 when Schrank was 28, his 19-year-old girlfriend Emily Ziegler was on her way to a church picnic on Long Island when the steamboat she was on, the General Slocum, caught fire. John was supposed to accompany her that day, but he couldn’t find anyone to cover his shift at the tavern. Emily and 1,020 other people died by fire or drowned in the East River. There were only 321 survivors. Schrank was reported in the local newspapers as having shown up at the morgue “wild-eyed” where he identified her burned body. The General Slocum disaster was New York’s worst tragedy in terms of lives lost until September 11, 2001.

Schrank’s uncle and aunt died in 1910 and 1911, leaving him their property. He was devastated, seeing them more as adoptive parents than as relatives. He sold his inheritance and holed up in sleazy motels, drinking, writing poetry, reading the Bible and several newspapers daily. Although he had admired Roosevelt, even going so far as to have his picture on the wall along with those of Lincoln, Grant and Garfield (the first and third of whom were assassinated, just for the record), when TR sought a third term and even went so far as to create a new party to secure his nomination, Schrank saw Roosevelt’s ambition as a slap in the face to the Founding Fathers (Washington had refused a third term and all presidents after him had also served no more than two terms, although Grant tried and failed to get a nomination for his third). To Schrank, Roosevelt’s campaign spelled certain disaster for the country: if he won, they’d have a Caesar in power; if he lost, he’d call foul like he had at the Republican Convention and plunge the country into another Civil War.

Then there was the dream. In writings the police found in Schrank’s possession, he described a dream he had had:

In a dream I saw President McKinley sit up in his coffin, pointing at a man in a monk’s attire in whom I recognized Theo. Roosevelt. The dead president said “This is my murderer, avenge my death.”

In an alternate version also found among his writings, it was more of a vision:

While writing a poem someone tapped me on the shoulder and said Let not a murderer take the presidential chair, avenge my death. I could clearly see Mr. McKinley’s features.

Before the Allmighty God, I swear that the above written is nothing but the truth.

So long as Japan could rise to be one of the greatest powers of the world despite her surviving a tradition more than 2000 years old, as General Nogi so nobly demonstrated. It is the death of the U.S.A. to uphold the third term tradition. Let every third termer be regarded as a traitor to the American cause. Let it be the right and duty of every citizen to forcibly remove a third termer.

That note is dated September 14, 1912, the same date on which President McKinley had died 13 years earlier after being shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz (assuming it wasn’t TR in disguise as a monk all along, of course). General Nogi was a hero of the Russo-Japanese War who offered to kill himself when he felt he had lost too many in the process of capturing Port Arthur (1904-1905). Emperor Meiji declined, but on the day of the emperor’s funeral, September 13th, 1912, Nogi committed ritual suicide so as not to outlive his master.

He seems to be saying that Japan became a world power despite its 2000-year tradition of feudal submission even unto death, but that an equal dedication to American tradition even unto death is what will keep the Republic alive in the face of third-termer would-be kings.

By September 14th, Schrank had been following Roosevelt around the country on campaign stops for four days. He kept at it for another month, waiting for the perfect opening to take a shot. That opening happened in Milwaukee on October 14th. Roosevelt, on the way to give a speech at the Milwaukee Auditorium, took a moment to wave to the crowd from his car when Schrank raised his Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver and fired a single shot. Roosevelt bounced back up, at first unaware that he had been hit. His secretary Albert Martin jumped on the shooter, and he and the police kept him safe from the furious crowd demanding Schrank be lynched on the spot.

Roosevelt asked that Schrank be brought before him so he could ask why he had shot him. Schrank did not reply, although he would tell the police everything after his arrest. With an expression of pity for the poor deranged man, Roosevelt and his team got back in the car and headed to the auditorium. On the way, one of his companions noticed there was a hole in TR’s overcoat. Teddy touched it and saw that he was bleeding, that he had in fact been shot. His escorts of course wanted to change direction and drive straight to the hospital; however, Teddy Roosevelt coughed a couple of times and when he saw no blood, figured the bullet hadn’t made it to his lungs, so he insisted on being driven to his speaking engagement as planned.

This is how he opened the speech:

Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet — there is where the bullet went through — and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.

He opened his overcoat to show the crowd the bloody bullet hole. His 50-page speech had two bullet holes in it (it was folded in half in his pocket) and his eyeglasses case had a hole in it too. These obstacles had slowed down the bullet enough to keep it in the fleshy part of his chest, although it was on an upward trajectory towards his heart.

An hour and a half later, his speech finally done, he was taken to Johnston Emergency Hospital where six surgeons operated but could not find the bullet. X-rays showed that the bullet was 3.5 inches under the surface of the right side of his chest, touching his fourth rib. Only a thin layer of tissue separated the bullet from the pleural cavity. He recovered for a week at a Chicago hospital. Seeing that he was improving, doctors decided it was better to leave the bullet where it was than to attempt to remove it surgically with all the attendant risks.

Roosevelt got much sympathy from the people and from the other candidates, who suspended their stump speeches because Roosevelt was unable to deliver his. He was not, however, carried to the presidency on a wave of pity. He beat Taft in popular and electoral votes, but both of them were defeated handily by Woodrow Wilson. President Taft, in one of his last presidential acts, pardoned Captain Van Schaick, the captain of the General Slocum who had been convicted of criminal negligence in the disaster and sentenced to ten years in Sing Sing.

Schrank pled guilty to attempted murder, was found to be insane and was confined for the rest of his life to Central State Mental Hopsital in Waupun, Wisconsin. He died of bronchial pneumonia in 1943 at the age of 67. Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep of coronary thrombosis in 1919. He was 61 years old.

Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace at 28 East 20th Street in New York City is now a National Park. They had an exhibit on the 1912 campaign earlier this summer which has now moved to the Oyster Bay Historical Society where it will be on view until November 11th. To get a virtual dose of TR, see the Library of Congress’ collection of Teddy Roosevelt captured on film and audio recordings of some of his speeches.

Two years ago, Dr. Sue Moore and graduate student Kevin Chapman of Georgia Southern University found the stockade wall of Camp Lawton, a short-lived Confederate prisoner of war camp established in Millen, Georgia to house overflow Union prisoners from nearby Andersonville Prison, the notoriously overcrowded hellhole in which 12,913 out of the total 45,000 Union prisoners received would die from starvation, disease or violence. Camp Lawton was the largest Civil War prison camp in terms of area (42 acres), but it only held 10,000 prisoners for six weeks. It was evacuated overnight in great haste in November of 1864 when General Sherman’s troops approached during the March to the Sea.

Sherman burned the stockade, and a pine forest grew where the camp had once stood. The area was known to historians, but nobody thought there was anything to find since the stockade was ashes and the camp had been in use for such a brief time. Desultory attempts by archaeologists to locate remains had been unsuccessful; treasure hunters had no interest in exploring a remote location with so little expectation of lucrative discovery.

The area became the Magnolia Springs State Park in 1939, and an adjacent chunk of land was made part of the Bo Ginn National Fish Hatchery under the aegis of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. State and federal protection continued to keep the site in basically untouched condition. There were some archaeological surveys over the years, but shovel tests never turned up any artifacts. A ground-penetrating radar survey of the site by Georgia Department of Transportation archaeologists in 2005 revealed two linear anomalies that seemed to match the documentary evidence of the orientation and placement of the Camp Lawton stockade. Historic Preservation Division archaeologists returned the next year to excavate the anomalies. They found a dark stain in one of their excavation holes which they determined to be a burned log, a likely remnant of the stockade burned by Sherman.

In 2009, experts from the LAMAR Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to archaeological research in the southern US, went back to the locations examined in 2005 and 2006 to perform another, more detailed ground-penetrating radar survey. This study was the initial investigation phase of a long-term project by Georgia Southern University to locate and excavate whatever might be left of Camp Lawton and its residents. The LAMAR Institute followed up with a metal detector survey of the site, which turned up a remarkable quantity of artifacts left behind by Union soldiers.

This was a highly significant step, both because it gave Georgia Southern’s excavation team a map grid of the site with known locations of artifacts and because it upended archaeological conventions that see the metal detector as an unreliable tool for amateurs. Camp Lawton is a Confederate prisoner of war camp in pristine archaeological condition replete with period artifacts, one of the most important Civil War sites we have. It is the metal detectors that identified it as such. Previous shovel testing had revealed a grand total of two artifacts.

So in 2010, Georgia Southern University, using the LAMAR data and extensive research into Civil War documents, primarily eye-witness accounts from surviving prisoners like prolific mapmaker, artist and Union private Robert Knox Sneden, began to excavate the site and hit paydirt. They unearthed hundreds of artifacts and put Camp Lawton on the map, both literally and figuratively in terms of its historical significance.

Last week, Camp Lawton was host to a much bigger crowd of researchers with many fabulous high-tech toys. Georgia Southern University archaeologists were there, of course, as was LAMAR Institute archaeo-geophysicist Dan Elliott who has uploaded several videos of the excavation to his YouTube channel, and most splashily, PBS’ Time Team America. In classic Time Team fashion, they hit the site with all they had for just a week. There were four teams wielding ground-penetrating radar, another team deploying a fluxgate gradiometer (a tool that measures the gradient of the magnetic field to find small objects close to the surface), another team using electromagnetic conductivity meters to locate buried archaeological features, and metal detectorists, all dedicated to mapping the underground landscape as thoroughly and efficiently as possible. Once that was done, heavy machinery and dozens of archaeologists with trowels and sifting screens stepped in.

Their goal was to locate and unearth the former walls of the prison camp. They were successful. On Thursday, October 4th and Friday, October 5th, the team excavated three of the prison stockade walls. Several living areas of prisoners and guards were also excavated. The details of the discoveries are being hushed up for now so that we can be surprised when the Time Team America episode airs. That means we have to wait until summer of 2013, annoyingly enough, to see just what it is this impressive cadre of archaeologists unearthed.

At least we can catch a glimpse of the stockade trenches in Dan Elliott’s videos. This video shows the south stockade wall and it’s my favorite because of the last line:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hQFo7jxMPM&w=430]

:giggle: Isn’t that great? You know they had a total blast.