Thomas Paine’s Bones

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Places & Travel, Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2025

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Founding Fathers” like Washington or Jefferson have gigantic monuments in Washington, statues galore and palatial house-museums. But what about…Thomas Paine? The author of “Common Sense,” the pamphlet that brought the idea of American independence to the masses, was considered a hero after the American Revolution. But then he experienced a remarkable fall from grace, which ended in his burial in a pauper’s grave and…well, some graverobbers disinterring his body and spreading his bones all over the world. Feelin’ the Paine? Check out the biography “Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations” by Craig Nelson, this Library of Congress article on Paine’s bones, and a discussion of Paine’s philosophy on this episode of the BBC’s In Our Time. Or see his New Rochelle farmhouse (and…former grave) for yourself: https://www.thomaspainecottage.org/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Maybe we can start with a little bit of a word association.
0:03.6	So I'm going to say a name and just tell me what you think about.
0:06.3	So the name is Thomas Payne.
0:09.5	Yeah, Thomas Payne.
0:11.1	I mean, first thing, of course, founding father, part of the whole revolutionary guard, whatever.
0:18.7	You know, like part of that crew.
0:22.2	I think of Thomas Payne as being like a, like a classic kind of enlightenment figure against the monarchy for
0:30.7	sort of individual rights. And like I also, I have the sense of him as kind of like a little bit of an edge lord.
0:39.4	Like some of the founding fathers were more of edge lords than others.
0:42.8	And I feel like Thomas Paine.
0:43.7	Yeah, he's definitely one of them.
0:45.0	I think of Thomas Paine as like perfect example of like enlightenment founding father,
0:50.9	edge lord.
0:52.2	And when we think of like that crew, you know, Washington has his
0:57.5	monument in D.C. Jefferson has one as well. They also have like prominent homes that are
1:02.2	affiliated with them. Giant estates that you can go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But do you have any sense of where
1:07.6	Thomas Payne is located? Any memorials, any burial sites, anything like that for Thomas
1:12.9	Payne? I honestly can't think of anything. I actually, I really can't, like, there must be,
1:19.5	there must be statues somewhere. Now they're thinking about it. You're like, wait a minute.
1:22.8	Where is the Thomas Payne stuff? Where is he bear? Is there a monument somewhere?
1:28.2	So I'm going to show you a photo.
1:31.2	And this is actually an object that was sold at an antiques fair in Australia in the 1980s.
	...

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