busy1. A roadside marker which marks Taylor's birthplace at Montebello SR 33W, located between Gordonsville and Barboursville, VA
2. Springfield, Taylor's boyhood home, located at 5608 Apache Road, Louisville, KY. It is privately owned and not open to the public.
3. Zachary Taylor National Cemetery, Taylor's resting place. It is located at 4701 Brownsboro Road, St. Matthews, east of Louisville, KY. Located there is a marble mausoleum at the grave site.
Taylor died on July 9, 1850 (163 years ago today, in Washington, D.C. at the age of 65. Five days earlier, taylor had attended the July 4th holiday celebrations. He had eaten some cherries, and drank iced milk after attending a fund-raising event at the Washington Monument, which was then under construction. Over the next few days, he became severely ill with an unknown digestive ailment. His doctor diagnosed the illness as "cholera morbus", a mid–nineteenth-century term used for intestinal ailments of everything from diarrhea to dysentery. Despite treatment, Taylor died at 10:35 p.m. on July 9, 1850.
Taylor was interred in the Public Vault of the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. from July 13, 1850 to October 25, 1850. His body was transported to the Taylor Family plot known as 'Springfield' in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1883, the Commonwealth of Kentucky placed a fifty-foot monument in his honor near his grave; it is topped by a life-sized statue of Taylor. During the 1920s, the Taylor family initiated the effort to turn the Taylor burial grounds into a national cemetery. The Commonwealth of Kentucky donated two pieces of land for the project, turning the half-acre Taylor family cemetery into 16 acres. On May 6, 1926, the remains of Taylor and his wife Margaret (called Peggy, who died in 1852) were moved to the newly constructed Taylor mausoleum. The cemetery property has been designated as the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery.
Almost immediately after Taylor's death, rumors began to circulate that Taylor was poisoned by pro-slavery Southerners, who were angry at Taylor over his lack of support for slavery. Similar theories persisted into the twentieth century. In the late 1980s, Clara Rising, a former professor at University of Florida, persuaded Taylor's closest living relative, who was also the coroner of Jefferson County, Kentucky, to order an exhumation so that his remains could be tested. The remains were exhumed and transported to the Office of the Kentucky Chief Medical Examiner on June 17, 1991. Samples of hair, fingernail, and other tissues were removed, and radiological studies were conducted. The remains were returned to the cemetery and reinterred, with appropriate honors, in the mausoleum.
Neutron activation analysis conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory revealed no evidence of poisoning. Arsenic levels were considered too low to support that theory. The analysis concluded Taylor had contracted "cholera morbus, or acute gastroenteritis", and his food or drink may have been contaminated. Any potential for recovery was overwhelmed by his doctors, who treated him with "ipecac, calomel, opium and quinine (at 40 grains a whack), and bled and blistered him too." But even this conclusion is open to question. A 2010 review concludes: "there is no definitive proof that Taylor was assassinated, nor would it appear that there is definitive proof that he was not." Conspiracy therists have their second wind!
Taylor was a heroic general with a reputation for doing more with less. He won a series of battles during the Mexican War in which his forces were severely outnumbered. He had his troops siphoned off by the egotistical General Winfield Scott and his President James Polk was jealous of the political notoriety that military success was giving to Taylor, so Polk too withdrew his support of Taylor. Despite this, Taylor performed admirably as a military leader. As President, Taylor stood up to Henry Clay and to southern slaveholders in a brilliant display of presidential independence, proving that he was not in anyone's pocket. If he had lived to complete his term, he may have had the backbone necessary to prevent the upcoming civil war.
Zachary Taylor deserves a full blown Presidential Museum and Library.