A Stone Silent: The Enigma of Button Gwinnett

The Signers Monument, a 50-foot granite obelisk in Augusta, Georgia, venerates three signatories of the Declaration of Independence: George Walton, Lyman Hall, and Button Gwinnett. Commissioned by Robert French in 1848, this monument narrows to its peak, emblazoned with Georgia’s emblem and their names. Walton and Hall were exhumed and reburied beneath the base, but Gwinnett's remains remain elusive. Initially, the intent was to inter all three signees.

The quandary of locating Gwinnett's corpse arose since he expired in Savannah after a duel in 1777. Although it's widely assumed his mortal remains are in Savannah's Colonial Park Cemetery, there was no marker to verify it. In 1848, Walton and Hall were relocated beneath the monument, but no Gwinnett. An excavation in the 1950s by a retired school principal yielded a skeleton, not Gwinnett's. The identification of the remains was indeterminate, but the Smithsonian Institution suggested they were feminine remains.

The mystery lingers, and it's plausible that Gwinnett's remains are still hidden beneath the Signers Monument, waiting to be discovered.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons