Stolen “Pope’s Stone”
“The Stone” was a gift to America from the Vatican and Pope Pius IX (d. 1878). It was incorporated into the Washington Monument while the obelisk was under construction. In 1854, after the monument had risen 152 feet, it was stolen by nine members of the Know-Nothing party, an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant political group.
Nearly thirty years later, one of the nine culprits revealed what they had done with it. In 1883, a man identified only as "the saloon keeper" came forward to The Washington Post and described what happened to the stone.
Nine of us did the job on Sunday night, the 5th of March, 1854. We attended a meeting of the Know-nothing order, to which we all belonged, on the Tuesday night previous at Thorn’s hall, next door to the Odd Fellows hall on Seventh Street. There was a good deal of speaking going on about the shame of having a stone from any king or potentate inserted in the monument of a man who had found against royal tyranny, and finally it was agreed that nine men should be selected by lot to destroy the stone.
He detailed how the men had tied up the night watchman at gunpoint, rolled the stone to the Potomac River, broke it, hoisted it into a boat, and at the sight of a red lantern signal from co-conspirators stationed on the Long Bridge, pushed it over the side of the boat.1
As a result of the incident a number of religious organizations withdrew their support and construction came to a grinding halt. The incident explains, in part, why it took 40 years to complete the edifice.
128 years after the theft of “the Pope’s Stone,” a replacement was commissioned and purchased by Father James Grant, a priest from Spokane, Washington. The new stone was installed on the 340 ft. level by the National Park Service in 1982.
The generous Father Grant died in 2006, aged 82, his mortal remains interred at Holy Cross Cemetery in Spokane.
https://boundarystones.weta.org
Another very cool story I never knew existed. Thanks Jim!
Wow…never heard this story before. Thanks for yet another interesting slice of history!