Plan to dig up body stirs trouble

NASHVILLE, Tenn.— President James K. Polk did big things for America, dramatically expanding its borders by annexing Texas and seizing California and the Southwest in a war with Mexico. Achieving undisturbed eternal rest has proved more difficult.

In a proposal that has riled some folks in Tennessee, including a very distant relative of the nation’s 11th president, some state lawmakers want to move Polk’s body to what would be its fourth resting place in the nearly 170 years since he died of cholera.

The plan is to exhume Polk’s remains and those of his wife, Sarah, from their white-columned tomb on the grounds of the state Capitol in Nashville and take them about 50 miles to his father’s home, now known as the James K. Polk Home and Museum, in Columbia. A vote on the resolution could come as early as Monday.

Teresa Elam, who says she is a seventh-generation great-niece of the childless Polk, called the whole idea “mortifying.”

“I got so upset about it because they’re going to take these bodies of these fine, wonderful people and bring them down to Columbia and put them on display to make money,” she said.

Backers of the resolution, including Sen. Joey Hensley, a Republican whose district includes the museum, have argued that Polk’s tomb is in an out-of-the-way spot on the Capitol grounds and that he deserves better.

“I think I have been here 14 years and really didn’t know, had never visited James K. Polk’s tomb,” Hensley said.

The curator of the Polk museum, Thomas Price, who also backs the idea, argues that Polk spent a lot of time in Columbia.