• General Notes

  John Scott Harrison (1804-1878) was an American Congressman who represented the second district of Ohio from 1853 to 1857. To date, he is the only person in history who was the son of one President (William Henry Harrison) and the father of another (Benjamin Harrison).
  
  John Scott was born to William Henry and Anna Symmes Harrison on October 4, 1804 at Vincennes, Indiana. He studied medicine, but became a farmer. He was elected to Congress in 1852 as a Whig and in 1854 as a Republican. When he was defeated in 1856 he retired to his farm in Hamilton County, Ohio.
  John Scott Harrison, was a representative from the state of Ohio.
  Harrison died on May 25, 1878 at his home near North Bend, Ohio and was buried in the Harrison tomb there. His body was stolen from its grave, and was later discovered in the quarters of a medical student who lacked legitimate access to corpses for medical study.[1]
  
  
  Ohio History: The Scholarly Jouranal of the Ohio Historical  Society
  Body Snatching in Ohio             
  Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly   Page 348 Volume 59
  
  
  The most sensational case of body snatching ever to occur in Ohio, and perhaps in the United States, was the famous "Harrison case" at North Bend, near Cincinnati, in 1878. In May of that year the Hon. John Scott Harrison, son of William Henry Harrison and father of Benjamin Harrison, died of an obscure disease and his remains were laid to rest in the family burial plot at North Bend. Every precaution was taken to make his grave secure--a cemented brick vault was built in the grave, and after the casket
  was deposited and the roof of the vault completed, heavy stones mixed with earth were used to fill the grave. To add to the security a watchman was engaged to visit the grave hourly every night for a week.
  On the day of the funeral it was discovered that an adjoininggrave of young Augustus Devin, who had died about a week previously, had been disturbed and his body stolen. The following day two of his friends, one of whom was a son of the recentlydeceased John Harrison, journeyed to Cincinnati to search the medical colleges there for his body. Provided with search warrants they went first to the Ohio Medical College, where they failed to find the missing body. However, to their horror they
  discovered the nude body of John Scott Harrison dangling from a rope which hung taut from a windlass through a trap door into a dark and gloomy chute. Naturally this shocking episode created
  a sensation.
  Also sensational was the disclosure that, aided by the janitor of the Miami Medical College, the notorious resurrectionist Morton, alias Gabriel, alias Dr. Christian, and the demonstrator of anatomy at the medical college of the University of Michigan were in collusion for the purpose of bootlegging bodies to the latter institution. It was here that the body of young Devin wastraced and found in a vat of brine.45
  The Ohio State Journal of October 9, 1879, reported that"some pretty strange stories are told of the systematic manner in which dead bodies are carted away from the County burial ground.
  The manner in which it is said to be done would indicate that there is some official traffic connected with the transactions." This brief item ends with the statement that the affair should be looked
  into. Shortly thereafter, it was reported that the people in the vicinity of Harrisburg were convinced that there was traffic in cadavers in their locality and that the resurrection of the body of a man, with no relatives to look after his recently made grave, had taken place there without doubt, and it was implied that a local doctor was the guilty body snatcher.
  
  
  

Details of John Scott's family with Lucretia Knapp Johnson

Details of John Scott's family with Elizabeth Ramsey Irwin.