text: Unknown Soldier On October 3, 1921, Olympia departed Philadelphia for Le Havre, France, to bring the remains of the Unknown Soldier home for interment in Arlington National Cemetery. On October 25, 1921 there was a dockside ceremony where the casket, which had been selected on the previous day, arrived by train from Paris and was handed over by the Army to a bearer party of sailors and marines who carried it on board with all honors. Olympia received a 17-gun salute as she departed, escorted by  and a group of eight French destroyers for part of the voyage.  The casket did not fit below deck, so it was lashed to the weather deck and covered in canvas. During the crossing Olympia encountered the fifth tropical cyclone of the 1921 Atlantic hurricane season. Increased coal consumption during the storm lightened the ship, exacerbating its tendency to roll. Later in the crossing Olympia encountered the remains of the 1921 Tampa Bay hurricane. At the mouth of the Potomac river on November 9, the battleship  and the destroyer  joined Olympia as she steamed to the Washington Navy Yard. After transferring the remains ashore, the cruiser fired her guns in salute. She conducted a last training cruise for midshipmen in the summer of 1922.
  Preservation
  On December 9, 1922, she was decommissioned for the last time in Philadelphia and placed in reserve. On June 30, 1931, the ship was reclassified IX-40, to be preserved as a relic.
  On September 11, 1957, she was released to the Cruiser Olympia Association, restored to her 1898 configuration and became a museum ship under their auspices. The main eight-inch guns and turrets, scrapped before World War I, were replaced with sheet metal fabrications. In January 1996, when faced with mounting debt and tremendous deferred maintenances, the Cruiser Olympia Society merged with the Independence Seaport Museum (ISM) in Philadelphia.