Street Level
The Mysterious Hotel Guests
A new exhibit on presidents who visited Greensboro highlights an unanswered question
By Jim Schlosser
T
he story is so unbelievable that it just might be true. Perhaps it’s best not to let skepticism spoil a good piece of Greensboro historical trivia. On July 19, 1881, three men are purported to have walked into the Central Hotel at Elm and Market streets and registered for one room, No. 5. According to the register, two of the three included Ulysses S. Grant, former president of the United States and top general of Union forces during the Civil War; and Gen. Dan Sickles, a scandalous famous figure who at Gettysburg lost a leg, which he donated to a museum, where it remains today. The date was only 16 years after the Civil War ended. Could the commander of Union forces really be staying in a city that had sent lots of young men to fight and die for the Confederacy? “Forget, Hell!” Some former rebels here still harbored hatred of anything blue or Yankee. After the war, Ulysses S. Grant served as president from 1869–77. His tenure came during a period many in the South despised: Reconstruction. That’s when, among other reforms, federal occupiers elevated some newly freed slaves and other so-called carpetbaggers rose to public offices. This caused apoplexy among many locals. That Grant and Sickles may have visited here is highlighted in an exhibit this election season at the Greensboro Historical Museum. The exhibit focuses on presidential visits to Greensboro, either before or after the men held office or while they served. Including Grant, the museum staff counts 18 presidents who dropped by the Gate City, starting with the first, the nation’s Founding Father, George Washington, and ending with the incumbent, President Barack Obama. Washington stopped here in his magnificent coach in 1791, before Greensboro was founded. He toured the battlefield where the tide-turning Battle of Guilford Courthouse was fought in 1781 during the American Revolution. The other presidents are Andrew Jackson (who practiced law here as a young man), Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George
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Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Grant is the most intriguing of the bunch. The hotel registry is the only evidence that remains that suggests a man named U.S. Grant was in Greensboro. The local weekly newspapers of July 1881, The Greensboro Patriot and The North State, made no mention of the former president being here or of the notorious Dan Sickles. In 1859, Sickles was acquitted on the grounds of temporary insanity of killing his wife’s lover. He was nearly court-martialed for conduct at Gettysburg, but wound up being awarded the Medal of Honor instead. Two days after July 19, 1881, The North State ran a story that Grant was in Ohio for the dedication of a monument to Gen. James McPherson, the highest ranking Union officer killed during the Civil War. The Grant-Sickles registration entry was discovered about 50 years ago by Bill Moore, then a student at what’s now High Point University and the man who later would serve for decades as the Historical Museum’s executive director. While visiting the museum, he encountered the registration book and spotted among the many names those of Grant and Sickles. He showed the entries to the staff, who had no idea they were on the registry. That day was pivotal for Moore. “That got my interest up in the Historical Museum,” he says. He would soon join the staff and began a rise to the top position, from which he retired about eight years ago. He doubts if a prankster penned Grant’s name. A jokester, he theorizes, would have stopped at Grant’s name. He wouldn’t have seen fit to add Sickles. Even though the two were friends, the public didn’t associate the two. But neither Grant’s nor Sickle’s name on the registry matches his signature. Maybe, just maybe, they were registered by a third person traveling The Art & Soul of Greensboro