John Scott Harrison was one of ten children born to Indiana Territory Governor (and future United States President) William Henry Harrison. John was elected to and served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1852 to 1857. After he was defeated for a third term, he retired to his farm in Ohio. John and his second wife Elizabeth, were the parents of ten children, including future United States President Benjamin Harrison. (John had three children with his first wife Lucretia.) John Scott Harrison is the only person to have been both a father and son of a U.S. President.
John Scott Harrison died in 1878 at the age of 73. He was buried in a family plot in North Bend, Ohio – from where his body was stolen. Grave robbing was a common practice at the time, as fresh corpses were purchased by medical schools from shady characters with no questioned asked. On the day of John Scott Harrison’s funeral, it was discovered that the body of Augustus Devlin, who was interred in an adjacent grave, was stolen. The next day, John’s son Benjamin and a colleague went — with search warrants — to Ohio Medical College in hopes of finding Devlin’s body. Their investigation brought them to a delivery chute where they discovered the naked body of John Scott Harrison hanging from a rope. Devlin’s body was later discovered preserved in a vat of brine at the University of Michigan’s medical college. The Harrison family brought charges against the Ohio Medical College. This eventually contributed to the passage of the Ohio Anatomy Law of 1881, a landmark statute, whereby medical schools were provided with unclaimed bodies in a more regulated and documented fashion, discouraging grave robbers.