WASHINGTON — Grand and ornate, the 9-foot-tall, decorative marble urns for decades flanked the stage of Arlington National Cemetery’s Memorial Amphitheater, adjacent to the Tomb of the Unknowns.
Next weekend, however, the urns, designed by the same firm that built the New York Public Library and the Russell Senate and Cannon House office buildings, will stand not at the forefront of one of the nation’s most venerated shrines but rather for sale at the Potomack Co., an Alexandria, Va., auction house.
The urns are literally “a piece of history,” as the antiques dealer who now owns them likes to say. But their historic value — evident in photos of presidential visits since Woodrow Wilson dedicated the memorial in 1920 — is exactly why preservationists were stunned to learn they are being sold to the highest bidder.
“It’s alarming to see portions of our national legacy being sold off,” said Robert Nieweg, director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s southern field office. “It raises some red flags for us, and we have some very significant concerns about the cemetery’s stewardship of this extraordinarily historic place.”
How the urns, witness to so many public ceremonies, landed in private hands is something of a mystery. Under the strict procedures the federal government has adopted to protect its property — and particularly artifacts with both historic and artistic value — the urns should have been restored or put in a museum, not put on the open market, preservationists said.
Since 1997, the urns have been at DHS Designs, an antiques shop in Queenstown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Darryl Savage, the owner, is closing his store and auctioning off his inventory, which includes 14 marble balusters that were part of the railing that rings the amphitheater.
In an interview, he said he acquired the urns from another dealer, whom he would not identify. That dealer, Savage said, acquired them from a company that renovated the amphitheater in the mid-1990s. Savage said the company performing the renovation replaced the urns with modern replicas and was allowed to take the originals.
The Department of the Army, whose stewardship of the cemetery has been questioned since an investigation found widespread burial problems there last year, confirmed that the contractor, Omni Construction, which later merged with Clark Construction, was to “dispose” of the urns.
But the Army, which learned of the sale of the urns from The Washington Post, has not been able to find the contract and could not provide details about how the urns or balusters were to be disposed of, said Gary Tallman, an Army spokesman.
“Splendid monument to the heroic dead”
Designed by Carrere and Hastings, one of the most prominent architecture firms of the early 20th century, Arlington National Cemetery’s Memorial Amphitheater is made of Danby marble quarried from Vermont.
Around the frieze above the colonnade are the names of 44 battles from the American Revolution to the Spanish-American War. Above the stage reads a portion of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”
After construction was completed in 1920, the Pullman Herald proclaimed the amphitheater “the most splendid monument to the heroic dead ever erected by any nation.”
The urns, carved with rams’ heads, snakes and eagles, sat atop pedestals in niches that frame the stage, an integral and symbolic part of the memorial. The Washington Post
