A small painting of Eliza Monroe Hay on display at Highland, the historic house museum that was James Monroe's home. Photo / Michael S. Williamson, The Washington Post
The cherry trees were bare under a dazzling blue sky as the group came up the hill carrying a small wooden box topped with flowers.
With a crowd of some 200 standing silently, the pallbearers stopped at the open grave and lowered the casket into the ground - the final step of a remarkable journey.
Eliza Monroe Hay died 185 years ago, penniless and alone, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Paris.
On Friday, her remains were reinterred with her family at the tomb of her father, United States president James Monroe, and between the graves of her mother, Elizabeth Kortright Monroe, and her sister, Maria Monroe Gouverneur.
“I’m overwhelmed,” said David Richardson, 70, one of six direct descendants of Eliza who attended the ceremony in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery on a breezy hilltop overlooking the James River.
Richardson, a retired banker from Delaware, grew up knowing that Eliza was his ancestor, but through family lore believed she was the black sheep of the Monroe family. “She was the crazy sister that ran off to Paris,” Richardson said.
It was the work of one woman - retired Virginia schoolteacher Barbara VornDick - who unearthed a new narrative for Eliza’s life.
She used years of research to show that a historical figure dismissed as arrogant and unstable was actually deeply committed to her family and had been swindled out of her inheritance by her brother-in-law.
Fleeing to Paris had been an attempt to regain her failing health and seek help securing a legacy for her grandchildren, VornDick’s research showed.
As she learned the true story, VornDick enlisted an army of helpers, many of them women, to pursue her unlikely goal of getting Eliza’s remains back from that deteriorating grave in Paris’s Per Lachese cemetery and reunited with her family in Virginia.
“I think my family got tired of me talking about this,” Susan Allen, the wife of former Virginia governor George Allen (R), said at the reinterment ceremony, which included a colour guard in Revolution-era military uniforms and songs from a Catholic Church choir.
The Allens were married years ago at Highland, the early James Monroe home outside Charlottesville where VornDick works part time as a tour guide, and Susan Allen and her mother both had given tours there without ever knowing the full story of Eliza Monroe Hay’s life.
When she heard VornDick speak about her efforts a year ago, Susan Allen said, “My mum and I were like, oh my gosh, we’ve got to follow this, we’ve got to get involved.”
Allen helped raise money for the Bringing Eliza Home Project, which involved an enormous logistical effort to provide documentation to French authorities, including tracking down every living descendant to secure permission for an exhumation.
The founder of Anubis, a French company that handled the exhumation and transport to the United States, as well as the Paris forensic scientist who authenticated the remains travelled across the Atlantic to attend the memorial service.
The project “became very emotional for me”, Dominic Vernhes, chief executive of Anubis, said as he waited for the ceremony to begin.
“This repatriation was a grassroots effort, funded entirely by private donations and driven by dedication and heart,” state Senator Bryce Reeves (R-Orange), whose office helped VornDick with some of the bureaucratic hurdles, said.
“This is about paying respect to a woman who served this nation quietly, but powerfully, during its formative years.”
VornDick, who said she had hoped to spend her retirement “in the recliner watching Hallmark movies”, delivered an emotional speech at the reinterment.
She arranged for a memorial Mass for Eliza at Richmond’s Cathedral of the Sacred Heart and secured permission from the cemetery and the state of Virginia for the day’s events.
As she researched Eliza, VornDick said, she came to feel a deep connection across the years.
“She was a real living, breathing human being who embraced many roles throughout her life,” VornDick said as she spoke before the open grave.
“She was a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a grandmother and a many-times great-grandmother to her descendants that are with us today.”
VornDick read a quote from Eliza’s last known letter, which had languished in the archives at William & Mary until VornDick found it, in which the 53-year-old daughter of America’s fifth president described her desperate straits with a last bit of bravado: “I will do all I can to sustain myself and if I fail, I can only feel that I have done my best”.
Her voice breaking with emotion, VornDick turned and looked at the casket in a hole next to President Monroe’s elaborate tomb.
“Eliza,” she said, “we have done our best to restore your reputation and repatriate your remains to your home … Rest in peace dear daughter of America, my friend from the past.”
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