Yesterday was one of those picture perfect days in Washington. Yes, we do get four or five of those each year. Edie and I decided to take a stroll, went to Georgetown, and wound up on R Street, near Dumbarton Oaks. We walked east on R Street, and before long wound up at Oak Hill Cemetery.

Oak Hill is a beautiful cemetery which winds down a steep hill into Rock Creek Park, and has been the resting place of Washingtonians since its creation in 1849. It is open to the public, and you could spend all day wandering its trails, but we were not so ambitious, and pretty much stuck to the loop around the James Renwick-designed chapel near the entrance.

But even this short loop enabled us to see much, starting (arbitrarily) with the tomb of Edward Stanton, President Lincoln’s Secretary of War (what? not Secretary of Defense?), who died at only 55, after he was nominated for the Supreme Court, but before he could be installed.

Then we saw the mausoleum built for Ben Bradlee, who served as managing editor of the Post during the Watergate investigation and was a close friend of John F. Kennedy. The mausoleum is quite controversial, I understand, because it was placed in a very central part of the cemetery, with opponents claiming it was wrong aesthetically and historically to place it there.

By the way, Bradlee’s bosses, Katharine and Philip Graham, are also in Oak Hill, and also have a central location, but they took a very different approach to their grave sites.

Of course, not all about the Grahams was so modest. Their house is just down R Street from Oak Hill.

Oak Hill is not without its sense of humor. The photos didn’t turn out but there is a stone for journalist Mark Shields that says “he loved his family, his friends, his country and ice cream”. And there is another stone for a married couple, which says: “We finally found a parking place in Georgetown”.

It is a non-denominational cemetery, and there are a number of Jewish burial sites, including that of our old friend Judy Falk, wife of my friend and ex-law partner David. Weirdly, as we were passing Judy, I received an email from David. Go figure.

And, although I am not sure who the Merricks were, their elaborate monument contains both a cross and a star of David. Again, go figure.

There also a few very modern designs, such as this one, honoring long-time DC architect Arthur Cotton Moore.

Finally, the R Street side of Oak Hill is bordered by a large wrought iron fence. I don’t know if the fence was part of the original 1849 design, but it is very old, and is now being restored to its original condition, piece by piece. It is an extraordinarily slow process, with the fence being dismantled section by section. As a section is dismantled, it is shipped to Baltimore where it is restored and then sent back and re-installed on site. Then another section is sent to go through the same process. Each section takes several months to restore.

The fence, pre-restoration, is black and rusty. Post restoration, it is the original green color (something discovered from looking at paint chips). Before the restoration process began, there was an attempt by the not-for-profit corporation to see what the public would prefer. They solicited opinions as to whether the fence should remain black after it was repaired, or go back to the original green. The result of the solicitation? 50% (exactly) for each. The board of directors then opted for the green.

Good choice.