F.O.J. Smith Tomb
Near Portland, Maine
Francis Ormond Jonathan Smith was a Maine congressman, newspaper editor, and business partner of Samuel Morse who helped finance the first telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore in eighteen forty-four. He was also spectacularly corrupt, self-dealing on telegraph contracts and fighting Morse in the courts for years. Smith, who died in eighteen seventy-six, rests in a tomb in the Egyptian Revival style, a granite monument in Evergreen Cemetery in Portland that looks like it belongs on the banks of the Nile.
The Egyptian Revival was fashionable in American cemetery architecture after Napoleon's Egyptian campaign sparked a craze for ancient imagery. Smith's tomb stands as a monument to a man who helped wire America together, enriched himself in the process, and wanted you to know it for eternity.
