John Paul Jones US Navy

Bro. John Paul Jones is better known as the father of the US Navy—he was a Scot from Kirkcudbright in the Borders and there joined St. Bernard’s Lodge No.122 in 1770, later becoming a member of the Lodge of Nine Sisters in Paris.

On 19th July, 1792, the body of American Revolutionary naval hero John Paul Jones was found on the floor of his apartment in Paris. He had died of kidney disease at the age of 45. The French took great pains to preserve Jones's body in case the Americans ever came for it, embalming it and sealing it in a lead-lined coffin before burying it in the only cemetery in Paris that would take Protestants. Six months later the cemetery was closed by the French Revolutionary government, the property sold, and the cemetery forgotten.

Then, in 1899, Horace Porter, a Civil War veteran and the American Ambassador to France, made it his personal mission to find Jones's grave, which was complicated by the fact that several buildings had been built over the site.

Porter hired men to dig multiple shafts under the buildings, and finally located several lead-lined coffins in 1905. One of them contained remains matching the description of Jones at the time of his death, so an autopsy was performed, showing that the deceased passed due to the same kidney disease that claimed Jones.

Porter then compared the facial structure of the remains to a bust of Jones made during his life, and a positive identification was made. Porter had a photograph taken of Jones's body before resealing it for transport to America.

On the orders of President Theodore Roosevelt, a U.S. Navy flotilla of 11 battleships arrived in France and, following a parade of honour given by the government of France, Jones's body was transferred to the armoured cruiser U.S.S. Brooklyn for transport to America. After the remains arrived in the U.S., President Bro. Roosevelt (himself a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy) presided over an epic memorial service for Jones, after which the "Father of the American Navy" was interred in a marble sarcophagus at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland where it remains to this day.

The GL of Maryland honoured his memory in 2016.