The Remains of the Day Treasury clerk story is John Kiriakou’s account of finding the grave of an obscure Treasury Department clerk who, during the 1814 British burning of Washington, went to the National Archives after everyone else had fled and rescued the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and George Washington’s military commission, rolling the documents into a sheet and hiding them in the rafters of a barn in Leesburg, Virginia until the British were pushed out.[1]
Kiriakou says the same clerk was later considered difficult by his superiors, who — rather than fire him and set a bad precedent — quietly transferred him to a dead-end post managing the National Lighthouse Service. Bored in the job, he invented the refractor light, which is still used in American lighthouses today and now bears his name.[2]