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My Florentine Origins as an Arlington National Cemetery Tour Guide

Writer's picture: Nick PerkinsNick Perkins

Arlington National Cemetery and Florence, Italy don’t have much in common.

Florence
Florence is where I began my journey to become a tour guide.

They both get plenty of visitors from all over the world, and both are breathtakingly beautiful in ways you’d be hard pressed to find elsewhere in the world. Yet, there’s probably not a ton of Family Feud categories in which both would pop up as viable answers.


But Florence is what brought me to Arlington National Cemetery.


I was sitting in a slightly-cramped and even-more-slightly hot hotel room amidst the classical Florentine architecture that was reminiscent of the District, on vacation with my dad, desperately in need of work. To alleviate my predicament, I was browsing D.C. tour guide job listings — I had done guide work before, and one of the great things about living in D.C is there’s really no shortage of places worthy of a tour.


I stumbled across a listing for a walking tour guide at Arlington National Cemetery. I’d been to the cemetery a few times before, and found it a fascinating place full of stories even the most seasoned historians may not have heard. Arlington also mesmerized me with its nature each time I had visited — I figured there couldn’t be many better places to bask in the D.C. summer sun, or to watch the leaves change colors and drift down later in the year.

Arlington National Cemetery
Henry Johnson, a Buffalo Soldier and Medal of Honor recipient, is buried Arlington National Cemetery in section 15.

So I filled out each and every box of required information, and even went that extra mile every career fair since high school has mentioned and emailed a cover letter separately.



Changing of the Guards
A tour guest watches the Changing of the Guard ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns.

Almost half a year later, I’ve explored near every section in Arlington, told anecdotes about a multitude of figures in U.S. history, and seen more Changing of the Guard ceremonies than I can count. Friends sometimes ask if the work ever gets repetitive, leading tours in the same place day in and day out.


But as much as I regret the abject cheesiness of what I’m about to say, it never really gets old since no two tours are quite the same. That’s because Arlington — and D.C. as a whole — has so many hidden bits of history you might not uncover unless you spend all your time immersed in the locale’s particularities.


A few months ago I was leading a tour with a couple from Kansas who said they had a family member buried in Arlington. I figured the odds we would stumble upon the marker for the family member were infinitesimal — the cemetery has over 400,000 people buried in it, after all. And yet as I strolled up my typical tour route, explaining why you might be able to find symbols for witchcraft on some markers in the cemetery, the couple spotted the marker of their family member hiding right under our noses next to the road, for James Jabara. It turns out Jabara, a colonel, was the first Air Force jet ace, meaning I had yet another story added to my repertoire that had been hidden right along where I walked each and every day.


The goal of this blog is to highlight those stories throughout D.C. which you might pass by everyday without knowing the full history. What’s the irony behind a waffle shop named after Abraham Lincoln? How did the Swampoodle district get its name? Each week, we’ll look to answer one of those questions here, bringing the District’s underground history into the limelight. Plus, if anything catches your eye in particular, you can book a tour with Unscripted Tours to learn even more about what’s hidden in plain sight in D.C.




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