Robert Todd Lincoln
Section 31, Grave S-13
The first son of President Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln, and their only son to live to adulthood, Robert Todd Lincoln was a Harvard-educated lawyer, statesman and business executive. During the Civil War, he was commissioned as a U.S. Army captain and served as assistant adjutant to General Ulysses S. Grant. He then returned to civilian life, building a successful Chicago law practice. While he declined suggestions that he should run for the presidency, Lincoln did accept appointments as secretary of war (1881-1885) and as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom (1889-1893). He became president of the Pullman Car Company in 1897, after many years as the railcar manufacturer's general counsel. Robert Todd Lincoln is buried with his wife, the former Mary Eunice Harlan, whom he married in 1868.
In April 1927, Mary Harlan Lincoln and the Fine Arts Commission selected noted American sculptor James Earle Fraser to design a memorial on the south slope of the cemetery. The neoclassical memorial stone, landscape and plaza were designed as a single artistic work, consisting of three family graves, two benches and a backdrop of trees and hedges. Pink granite from Stony Creek, Connecticut was used for the memorial stone. It is one of two known works by James Earle Fraser at Arlington; the other is the President Taft Memorial Grave.