Jim Thorpe’s body will stay in the Pennsylvania town where he was laid to rest six decades ago after a federal appeals court on Thursday threw out a ruling that could have resulted in his reburial on American Indian land in Oklahoma.

The famed athlete’s surviving sons have been fighting to move the body to Sac and Fox land in the state where he was born, saying their father expressed a desire to be buried in Oklahoma. A federal judge agreed with them, ruling the town of Jim Thorpe amounted to a museum under a 1990 law intended to rectify the historic plundering of American Indian burial grounds.

But the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Thursday that Thorpe’s body should remain in Jim Thorpe, determining that U.S. District Judge Richard Caputo misapplied the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The law requires museums and federal agencies possessing American Indian remains to return them upon request of the deceased’s family or tribe.

“Thorpe’s remains are located in their final resting place and have not been disturbed,” the appeals court said in its ruling. “We find that applying (the repatriation law) to Thorpe’s burial in the borough is such a clearly absurd result and so contrary to Congress’s intent to protect Native American burial sites that the borough cannot be held to the requirements imposed on a museum under these circumstances.”

Thorpe’s grandsons had sided with the town – a tourism hotspot in the Pocono Mountains – saying it had done right by their grandfather.

Thorpe was a football, baseball and track star who won the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics. He died without a will in 1953 at age 64.

After Oklahoma’s governor balked at the cost of a planned monument to the athlete, third wife Patricia had Thorpe’s body removed in the midst of his funeral service and sent it to northeastern Pennsylvania. She struck a deal with two merging towns — Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk — to build a memorial and name the new town after him. His remains are kept in a roadside mausoleum surrounded by statues and interpretive signage.

“I’m very hopeful that from this decision, the two families can move together in peace and put this unusual chapter behind them,” said William G. Schwab, the town’s lawyer.

A lawyer for Thorpe’s sons did not immediately return a request for comment.


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