At the very point of giving up the quest for Brumidi’s grave I called all the old burial grounds in the District and asked that they search their records for a Brumidi burial in 1880. Glenwood Cemetery in Northeast Washington soon reported that Constantino Brumidi was recorded to have been buried there on February 21, 1880, in Lot 70, site 6.
On my first visit to the old section of Glenwood Cemetery I searched out Lot 70. It was surrounded by an iron fence bearing the name Germon, 1877, on a sagging gate. There was no marker on site 6, to indicate the burial place of Brumidi. It seemed clear to me that Lola Germon must have buried her artist husband in the old family burial plot since two small white stones, on sites 1 and 2 of Lot 70, evidently marked the burial places of Lola’s father and mother, the father having been buried there in 1855 and the mother some twenty years later.
As I looked upon Brumidi’s unmarked grave, the unknown grave of the artist who spent his last twenty-five years decorating the Capitol Building of the United States, I decided that sometime I would paint the little white-washed iron fence around Lot 70 as my personal tribute to those twenty-five Brumidi years. Several years went by. It was the spring of 1946 before I began painting the iron fence.
On my first painting day, as I labored, weaving highly colored fiction about the beautiful American girl and the romantic old artist, three times her age, I was startled by a young voice directly behind me which excitedly asked, “Why are you painting the fence around this Cemetery Lot?”
I turned to find a lovely girl watching my efforts with deep concern. I was so startled as to be unable to give any logical reason for painting an old fence partly hidden by poison ivy in the oldest corner of an old cemetery, so I asked the young visitor this question, “Why are you interested?” She replied quickly and firmly, “I have a right to know.”
Soon I found myself telling this girl the whole story of Brumidi and his unmarked burial place. She listened with an unbelievable concern and then launched forth with a story of her own that so far outmatched mine as to appear at first a bit of imaginative make-believe. Said she:
“All my life I have heard my people talk about this artist, Brumidi, and it seems that I have always known he was buried inside this little iron fence. His unmarked grave has had a strange fascination for me, ever since childhood. Every time I pass the cemetery in a street car I look over at this little iron fence on the hillside and think about this forgotten grave that means so much to me.
“As I was riding past today, wondering if I would forever be the only one interested in the lonesome little Brumidi fence, I suddenly thought I saw a woman painting that very fence. I kept telling myself it was not true, that I must have imagined such an unheard-of thing, and all the time my street car carried me farther and farther away. Finally, unable to stand the suspense any longer I got off the car, took a trolley back—and here I am—and there you are—,” and she stopped for breath.
Sensing my completely mystified expressions, she added, “You see, it was my great-grand aunt, Lola Germon, who modeled for the Capitol Madonnas and later married Brumidi.”
I went home with Lola Germon’s great-grandniece, Mildred Thompson, and met the Thompson family. Mildred’s mother slightly doubted my sanity for painting a cemetery fence belonging to a stranger but presently she laid before me a deed to the cemetery lot and a family album given to her by Lola Germon. Mrs. Thompson’s cemetery deed had been issued by Glenwood Cemetery to Eliza A. Germon, Lola’s mother, in 1866 and verified the cemetery records that show Brumidi as buried in Lot 70, site 6; Laurence Brumidi in site 4; and Lola Brumidi in site 5. (Only, Lola Germon Brumidi was Lola Virginia Kirkwood at the time of her death in 1918, and both she and her third husband, Edward Kirkwood, are buried in site 5.)