Great (John) Scott – The Harrison Horror Show
To donate one’s body to science is something we take for granted in the realm of end-of-life decisions. However, lost in today’s world is a term seldom remembered: Resurrectionists. Today, we’d call them body snatchers. In the 1800s they were a business, and it was one incident involving them, and a future Hoosier President that would change this.
John Scott Harrison has the honor of being the only man who’s the son of a U.S. President as well as the father to another. Both have Hoosier roots: our ninth president William Henry Harrison was Governor General of the Indiana Territory. Benjamin Harrison was our 23rd president.
Travel to North Bend, Ohio on the border with Indiana, and right up the hill from William Henry Harrison’s Tomb is Congress Green Cemetery, a final resting place for many of the Harrisons. Curiously, what isn’t there is John Scott Harrison’s grave next to his wife Elizabeth. He’s buried in William Henry Harrison’s Tomb next to his mother, Anna. The reason is one of the stranger stories in American history.
When John died in May of 1878, the practice of exhuming bodies and sending them to medical schools for dissection was in full swing. During John’s funeral it was observed that the body of recently deceased Augustus Devin, a family friend, had been resurrected. So the Harrisons supervised John’s burial.
According to the President of the Harrison Symmes Memorial Foundation, Elizabeth Rosenacker: “Harrison’s casket was metal and lowered into a brick vault with thick walls and a stone bottom. Three flat stones, eight or more inches thick, were to cover the casket, the largest at the head and two smaller at the foot end. All three were cemented together. For several hours the grave was left open so the cement would dry. Finally, they covered the grave with dirt.”
John Scott Harrison’s sons, including future president Benjamin Harrison, set out to find the body of their friend, Mr. Devin. Their search brought them to The Ohio Medical College in Cincinnati. Armed with search warrants and accompanied by the constable, their investigation led them to a curious chute in the building. To their horror, it wasn’t their friend Mr. Devin, whose body was hanging by a rope in that chute; it was the recently deceased John Scott Harrison.
We don’t truly know the sons’ initial reaction and due to a courthouse fire, we don’t know the outcome of the civil suit the Harrisons filed against the College. However, future president Benjamin Harrison was a well connected lawyer, a Civil War General and also served as a Federal Solicitor. John Scott’s grandfather, Benjamin the 5th, signed The Declaration of Independence. With those credentials and last name, justice was swift. To quote Ms. Rosenacker: “The real social impact from this grave robbing still affects us today. Less than two years after this happened to the Harrison family, the Ohio Legislature passed a statute which stopped the practice of the Resurrectionists. This statute had a penalty for body snatching which then led to a law for people to give their bodies to science. Secondly . . . burial vaults were invented and used to prevent grave robbing.”
Recently, Ohio History Connection wanted to verify the exact location of John Scott’s remains. After removing a brick and drilling a hole for a fiber optic camera into the vault next to Anna, they found the metal casket with his name plate. They placed a larger marker over the front.
He’s still there.