White House History 50 "Presidential Sites"

WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

Presidential Sites The Journal of T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I A T I O N Number 50

Please note that the following is a digitized version of White House History Quarterly, Issue 50, originally released in print form in 2018. Single print copies of the full issue can be purchased online at Shop.WhiteHouseHistory.org No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All photographs contained in this journal unless otherwise noted are copyrighted by the White House Historical Association and may not be reproduced without permission. Requests for reprint permissions should be directed to rights@whha.org. Contact books@whha.org for more information. © 2018 White House Historical Association.

All rights reserved under international copyright conventions.

the white house historical association Board of Directors

chairman Frederick J. Ryan Jr.

vice chairman and treasurer John F. W. Rogers

secretary James I. McDaniel

president Stewart D. McLaurin John T. Behrendt, Jean Case, Henry A. Dudley Jr., Cathy Gorn, Janet A. Howard, Knight Kiplinger, Martha Joynt Kumar, Anita McBride, Mike McCurry, Robert M. McGee, Roger B. Porter, Ann Stock, Ben C. Sutton Jr., Tina Tchen

ex officio David S. Ferriero, Carla Hayden, Tom Mayes, Earl A. Powell III, Harry G. Robinson III, David J. Skorton

directors emeriti

John H. Dalton, Jeannine S. Clark, Nancy M. Folger, Elise K. Kirk, Gail Berry West

white house history quarterly editor William Seale

vice president of publishing and executive editor Marcia M. Anderson

editorial and production director Lauren McGwin

senior editorial and production manager Kristin Skinner

editorial and production manager Elyse Werling

editorial assistant Jeanine Marie

consulting editor Ann Hofstra Grogg

consulting design Pentagram

editorial advisory Mac Keith Griswold Scott Harris Anthony Pitch Lydia Barker Tederick

the editor wishes to thank The Office of the Curator, the White House; and Susan Sarna and Sophie Weston Sistrunk of Sagamore Hill

CONTRIBUTORS m at t h ew alg e o is a journalist, public radio reporter, and author, whose book Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip, was named one of the best books of 2009 by the Washington Post. His most recent book is Abe & Fido: Lincoln’s Love of Animals and the Touching Story of His Favorite Canine Companion.

—page 46 cli f f o r d krai ni k is an author, lecturer, appraiser, and independent historian specializing in nineteenth-century photography. He coauthored Union Cases: A Collector’s Guide to the Art of America’s First Plastics and is currently writing the biography of photographer John Plumbe.

—page 6 patricia a . krider was the first executive director of the National First Ladies’ Library in Canton, Ohio, where she played a major role in developing the library’s first website. She currently serves on the Ohio Site Committee for the National First Ladies’ Library and on the advisory board of the Calvin Coolidge Foundation.

—page 36

ph i li p lev y is a historian, archaeologist, and associate professor at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Where the Cherry Tree Grew: The Story of Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home and George Washington Written Upon the Land: Nature, Memory, Myth, and Landscape.

—page 18 judith viggers nordin is president of the Arts Club of Washington. She was previously co-curator at the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum, assistant dean of the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, and associate dean at the Corcoran College of Art+Design.

—page 26 ant h o ny s . p i t c h is a former Associated Press journalist in America, England, Israel, and Africa, and author of non-fiction history books, including the History Book Club selection, The Burning of Washington: The British Invasion of 1814, and the award-winning, “They Have Killed Papa Dead!” —The Road to Ford’s Theatre, Abraham Lincoln’s Murder, and the Rage for Vengeance.

He serves on the White House History Quarterly Editorial Advisory.

—page 54

CONTENTS

B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

This special carved stone swag of fruit and flowers crowns the North Door of the White House.

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President McKinley’s Family Homestead in Canton, Ohio: The First Ladies National Historic Site

Foreword

william seale

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From the White House to the Piedmont and Back: Theodore Roosevelt’s Intrepid Ride cliff o rd krainik

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Finding the Lost Washington World at Ferry Farm: A Historic Site Reborn p hilip levy

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President James Monroe’s I Street Residence: Home of the Arts Club of Washington jud ith viggers no rd i n

patricia a . krider

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Harry Truman Ate Here: A Presidential Site in Frostburg, Maryland m at t h ew alg e o

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Washington Area Homes of the Twentieth Century Presidents: Before and After the White House ant h o ny s. pi t ch

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Reflections: Presidential Sites Summit s t ewart d. m claur i n

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FOREWORD

The Consummate PRESIDENTIAL SITE

w i t h t h i s r e l e a s e , we celebrate the fiftieth issue of White House History. We felt grown-up at the prospect of so venerable an age and decided to re-design the journal, not entirely abandoning the format we have used since the 1980s. We enlisted the aid and advice of Luke Hayman, partner in the distinguished Pentagram design firm in New York, and, thanks to Hayman and his colleagues, you hold here the first issue with a new look and a slightly new name, White House History Quarterly.

We have selected for the cover the iconic view of the White House as the world knows it. This is to introduce also a new theme that will run through the journal, and that is presidential sites. Because the White House is the consummate presidential site, we consider it a sort of flagship for hundreds more, and the journal will be featuring these sites great and small. Some are obvious, some we rather smoke out of obscurity.

This introductory issue is entirely about presidential sites. We explore one of the most interesting of them in recent years, Ferry Farm, childhood home of George Washington. You will find that it is mostly an archaeological project but has a lot to say about itself, including enough to accurately re-create the Washington house and even document that it was painted red. We go to Canton, Ohio, to visit

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President McKinley’s family home, where the president who introduced this nation to the world was a permanent guest of his wife’s kin.

We follow Harry and Bess Truman from Independence, Missouri, in retirement, to a diner for lunch, alone and unguarded, on their way to visit the national capital once again. Judith Viggers Nordin invites us into James Monroe’s house, right around the corner from our offices on Lafayette Square, which has been occupied for a century by the Arts Club of Washington. We also accompany Theodore Roosevelt on a muddy, icy trip on horseback from the White House breakfast table fifty miles to the old hotel in Warrenton, Virginia, to gauge the prowess and fatness of his military subordinates. Noted historian Anthony Pitch brings the issue to a close with a tour of places where twentieth-century presidents lived in Washington before or after serving in office.

w i lli am s eale editor, white house history quarterly

white house history quarterly

B L A I R H O U S E / U. S . D E PA R T M E N T O F S TA T E

The White House

The White House (detail), oil on photograph, by John Ross Key, 1914 white house history quarterly

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From the White House to the Piedmont AND BACK Theodore Roosevelt’s Intrepid Ride CLIFFORD KRAINIK

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George McClellan, dime novelist Ned Buntline, and Wallis Simpson, the future Duchess of Windsor.

Slightly to the south of the hotel building is a grassy lawn where once stood the Norris Tavern, where the Marquis de Lafayette was feted in 1825. In front of the courthouse is a statue of John Marshall. A few blocks from the center of Warrenton is a singlestory brick building, formerly an automobile dealership, then an A&P grocery store, that now serves as a Salvation Army thrift store.

Here customers, many of them “regulars,” have an opportunity to purchase a wide array of secondhand items, from kitchenware to costume jewelry and the proverbial knickknack. As a photographic historian and collector of antique photography since childhood, I have cultivated oblique sources for locating images of the past. At the Warrenton thrift store I have occasionally found family photograph albums filled with unidentified

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A skilled equestrian, Theodore Roosevelt is seen here with Major John Pitcher, Superintendent of Yellowstone Park in 1903. above

A view of Cannonball Ridge, just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, seen from the rolling streets of Warrenton, Virginia.

ABOVE AND OPPOSITE, TOP: LISA HELFERT FOR T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

warrenton, virginia , the seat of Fauquier County is located in the lush rolling Piedmont, fifty miles from Washington, D.C., just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Named after the fallen Revolutionary War hero Dr. Joseph Warren of Boston (John Adams’s personal physician), the town was incorporated in 1810 on land donated by Richard Henry Lee. It was visited by president-elect Bill Clinton in 1993 and twice by sitting presidents —Franklin Pierce in 1852 and Teddy Roosevelt in 1909. The wide pillared, neoclassical courthouse placed at the apogee of the town’s elevation serves as the terminus of three converging roads that date back to colonial times. The business district, easily mistaken for a movie set, is small but important for serving the needs of an affluent rural community.

Within the shadow of the courthouse are a number of historic sites. First, there is in the former Warren Green Hotel, a favorite lodging for Union General

right

The Salvation Army store in Warrenton where the author happened upon the photograph that inspired this article. below

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The Old Courthouse (seen here during the Civil War in a photograph

by Timothy O’Sullivan) was designed in 1853 by William Baldwin and rebuilt to the same plan following a fire in 1889.

portraits from previous generations. Once in a while, a photograph of a long-forgotten farmhouse or a stable might appear on the sale table.

Although I put myself in the orbit for discovery, I was not at all prepared to see, leaning against the sales counter, the large framed 1908 photograph of a heroic painting of Theodore Roosevelt—price, $10. I immediately recognized the gentleman wearing the wide-brimmed hat and dressed in riding outfit as the hero of San Juan Hill, and unquestionably, one of the greatest U.S. presidents of the twentieth century. The painting was signed “Gari Melchers” by the artist himself. But how did this extraordinary photograph—almost 2 feet tall and in its original walnut frame—of Roosevelt’s presidential portrait happen to end up in a thrift store in Warrenton, Virginia?

The story of the connection begins early in the winter of 1909, during the final days of Theodore Roosevelt’s second term in office, when the president became alarmed about the nation’s military preparedness. Certainly his doubts were not based on the might of the United States Navy fleet.

He demonstrated that America had become a major sea power following the Spanish-American War by dispatching a convoy of sixteen battleships—“The Great White Fleet”—on a worldwide goodwill tour in 1907. The appearance of the numerous formidable white-hulled warships, decorated with red, white, and blue banners on their bows, was the visual articulation of Roosevelt’s foreign policy of “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” It was not the fleet itself but the physical condition of the military officers who

manned the fleet that worried him. Having overcome a sickly childhood, Roosevelt promoted the benefits of strenuous physical activity throughout his adult life. He wrote in his autobiography: Some of the younger officers who were my constant companions on these walks and rides pointed out to me the condition of utter physical worthlessness into which certain of the elder ones [officers]) had permitted themselves to lapse, and the very bad effect this would certainly have if ever the army were called into service. I then looked into the matter for myself, and was really shocked at what I found. Many of the older officers were so unfit physically that their condition would have excited laughter, had it not been so serious, to think that they belonged to the military arm of the Government. A cavalry colonel proved unable to keep his horse at a smart trot for even half a mile, when I visited his post; a Major-General proved afraid even to let his horse canter, when he went on a ride with us; and certain otherwise good men proved as unable to walk as if they had been sedentary brokers. . . . It was late in my administration; and we deemed it best only to make a beginning—experience teaches the most inveterate reformer how hard it is to get a totally non-military nation to accept seriously any military improvement. Accordingly, I merely issued directions that each officer should prove his ability to walk fifty miles, or ride one hundred, in three days.1

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The business district in Warrenton today could easily be mistaken for a movie set.

know for whom or for what purpose. Roosevelt correctly reasoned that if it were known that the horses were for the presidential party, he would receive the very best mounts in the stable, but if the request was made for mere navy officers, the army would send their basic stock, which is exactly the nonpreferential treatment the president sought. He was determined that his ride should be a test matching as close to the same conditions the average officer would be required to meet. Admiral Rixey contacted his friend and fellow navy doctor, John Cropper Wise of Warrenton, to plan a luncheon at the Warren Green Hotel for a “party of four.”6 Roosevelt and Rixey were to be joined by the physician, Dr. Cary T. Grayson, USN, a native of Culpeper County, Virginia then residing in Georgetown, and by Captain Butt, who was originally from Augusta, Georgia. It is interesting that three of the four horsemen were southerners, and Roosevelt proudly laid claim to a southern heritage through his mother’s Georgia family, the Bullochs.

For the occasion the president wore a sweater, riding breeches, high top boots, and a broad-brimmed slouch hat. Captain Butt recounted the start of the ride from the White House to Warrenton: It was just twenty minutes to four when we mounted our horses. The President rode Roswell on the start and I had my old faithful Larry. The two Virginians had their own mounts also. We started on a dog trot down Pennsylvania Avenue and made the bridge in ten minutes. But, oh the wind was cold!

There were few clouds to be seen, and while

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A B O V E A N D O P P O S I T E , T O P : L I S A H E L F E R T F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

Secretary of the Navy Truman Newberry and Rear Admiral Presley M. Rixey, chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery and White House physician, responded to Roosevelt’s “directions” with a fitness directive, Navy General Order No. 6, issued on January 4, 1909. It required any officer up for promotion to pass a physical endurance test. The candidate could choose to complete either “a fifty mile walk within three consecutive days and in a total of twenty hours; a ride on horseback at a distance of ninety miles within three consecutive days; or a ride on a bicycle at a distance of 100 miles within three consecutive days. . . . Officers would not be promoted unless they passed the exam and their medical record would now include a fitness report.”2 One newspaper endorsed the program, saying, “This [order] will give the corpulent sea fighters who have long occupied swivel chairs an opportunity to get into fit condition for the ordeal.”3 There was however, an immediate objection to the program from within the military. Navy Surgeon James Gatewood feared that the endurance test would leave participants in a “depressed physical state” and promoted the maintenance of golf courses, bowling alleys, and tennis courts at navy installations instead.4 The president, angered by the “let’s build a country club” response to his physical fitness program, decided to challenge the naysayers with a literal show of force. According to Captain Archibald W. Butt, the president’s aide-decamp, it was Admiral Rixey who proposed, perhaps half-kiddingly, that the president and a few able friends ride to Warrenton, Virginia—a distance of about 50 miles—have lunch—then return to the White House on the same day. The 100 mile, oneday horse ride, would make a clear statement about the feasibility of Navy General Order No. 6 to the dubious military personnel. Admiral Rixey later admitted that he had no idea that the president would take him seriously. The Rough Rider who had journeyed to the bottom of Long Island Sound in a submarine and who would later fly in an experimental airplane in Paris thought the notion of a 100 mile horseback ride in the dead of winter, a “splendid idea.” Rixey later politely asked First Lady Edith Roosevelt to try to change the president’s mind, and she replied that “it would do no good whatever.” 5 Captain Butt was placed in charge of arranging for three sets of relay horses to be stationed along the Virginia countryside on January 13, 1909, without letting the commanding officer at Fort Myer

AUBURN VIRGINIA WIKI

The Warren Green Hotel appears today (above) much as President Roosevelt would have known it in 1909 when he stopped for a lunch of soup and rare roast beef. A photograph taken in the 1880s (right) includes horses awaiting their riders who are likely dining inside.

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everything was frozen hard there was no sign of a blizzard in the sky. . . . For the first six miles, in fact to Falls Church, the roads were fair and we made good time, but from Falls Church to Fairfax the roads were bad and we lost time.7 By 6:20 a.m. the quartet reached Fairfax Court House, where the first detachment of horses from Fort Myer were waiting. It took just fifteen minutes for the frigid horsemen to change mounts and leave at a brisk trot toward Centreville on the Old Alexandria Turnpike, present-day Route 29. A few miles past Centreville the next relay of horses was waiting, and by 7:30 a.m. the party reached Bull Run battlefield. The somber monuments erected to the memory of the fallen Civil War soldiers brought on a story that Captain Butt shared with his companions: “When one old General was talking of the Battle of Bull Run, one of his listeners asked, ‘Did you run, General?’ to which he promptly replied, all who didn’t are there yet.’”8

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By the time they reached Gainesville the riders were in fine spirits, and at 9:35 a.m. the last change of horses for the outgoing portion of the trip was made at Buckland, an eighteenth-century stagecoach town on the Fauquier and Alexandria Turnpike. It was hoped that the party would reach Warrenton by 11:00 a.m., but at times it appeared doubtful because the badly hardened furrowed road forced the riders to use the embankments.

Nevertheless, through sheer determination, the fatigued horsemen reached Warrenton just as the clock in the old courthouse sounded out the welcoming gongs of eleven bells.

The New York Times told the story of the lunch and the hospitality bestowed on the pilgrims: Good Dinner at Warrenton—The President was a hard man to follow, for he did not let his party rest more than ten minutes at any place, with the exception of Warrenton, where they took lunch or rather dinner, for the Presidential horsemen by that time

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The Old Courthouse remains a distinctive landmark on Main Street in Warrenton.

L I S A H E L F E R T F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

Low-res

When Roosevelt returned from his famous roundtrip one-day ride to Warrenton, the White House was covered with snow and likely appeared much as it does in this c. 1907 photograph.

First Lady Edith Roosevelt reportedly watched from a second story window for the president to return.

were famished. The President fell to and played havoc with soup and rare roast beef.

His three followers also proved themselves valiant trenchermen. The meal over, it was discovered that Warrenton had been advised by telephone of the President’s coming.

Business was suspended and the schools had been closed for the afternoon. A crowd of more than 1,000 persons had gathered outside and clamored for a speech. Mr. Roosevelt would much rather have rested comfortably after his big dinner, but he grinned good naturedly and went outside. His appearance was the signal for an outburst of cheering. When it had subsided, he said he was enjoying the ride to the utmost; that he was glad to be with them, and that he thanked them deeply for the kind reception. Then the good people of Warrenton lined up and Mr. Roosevelt shook hands with each, giving especial attention to the school children.9

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Not surprisingly, the newspaper reports were not entirely accurate. No doubt a large crowd did assemble to greet the president, but the U.S. census indicates that in 1910 Warrenton had a population of 1,427. If so, and if almost every man, woman and child would have been present at the Warren Green, the president would have had to remain late into the night to shake hands with each. Captain Butt’s account says that after the reception and a speech by Roosevelt were concluded, the weary riders “had to eat lunch in ten

minutes. He [the president] drank two cups of tea and ate some soup. The rest of us swallowed hunks of beef, but none of us took anything in the way of alcohol.” 10 The riders mounted their steeds at 12:15 p.m., and politely declined a request by members of the Warrenton Hunt who wished to escort the visitors over part of the return trip.

The presidential party reached Buckland about 1:30 p.m., slowed down in part by the condition of the road and the contentious nature of the army horses. Captain Butt’s mount in particular resented the trip back and made every effort to throw its rider. And even though the new set of horses obtained at Buckland proved more manageable, the esprit de corps of the travelers was at a low ebb. Captain Butt explained: Just before we reached Centreville we met the blizzard, which came in from the north in the shape of a blinding sleet storm, and this storm was continuous from this point to Washington. The wind was blowing a gale and the ice cut our faces so that I thought mine must certainly be bleeding. . . . When we reached Fairfax we got the horses on which we had begun the ride. . . . On any other horses I don’t think we would have made Washington without an accident, if indeed we had made it at all. We left Fairfax in inky blackness and walked practically the entire way to Falls Church. . . . Once, when I began to trot, the President’s horse went into a ditch, but luckily recovered himself without injury.11 Concerned that the icy streets of Georgetown would be impassable, Butt had one of the orderlies telephone the White House to have a carriage waiting to retrieve the horsemen. When the president was told of the plan he dismissed the offer saying, “By George, we will make the White House with our horses if we have to lead them.”12 The final torturous leg of the journey, stretching down icy, snow-swept Pennsylvania Avenue to the beckoning warmth of the White House was completed at 8:30 p.m. Captain Butt concluded his narrative of the adventure with this poetic vignette: Mrs. Roosevelt was watching for us from the window of Miss Ethel’s room, and by the time we alighted she was standing in the doorway to welcome us. It was a perfect picture. She

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A reporter for the New York Times gave a much more exciting account of the return of the intrepid horsemen: When he (the president) rode up to the portico of the White House at 8:30 tonight he was covered with mud and ice from the brim of his Rough Rider hat to the tops of his riding boots.

He sprang from his steaming mount, however, with the alacrity of a boy just back from a canter on the bridle path in the park, threw the reins to an orderly, and, after shaking himself to cast off his icy mail, disappeared into the White House. Before the doors closed behind

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him, the President flung back three hearty words—this with a grin that showed all his teeth and wrinkled his weather-beaten face into a hundred little furrows: “It was bully!” 14 Two days after this epic winter test of riders and horses, the president penned a note on a crisp sheet of White House stationery that summarized the journey: My Dear Captain Butt: I desire that this letter be filed with your record. On January 13th, you rode with me from the White House, Washington to the inn at Warrenton, Virginia, and back, a distance which we have put at 98 miles, but which I am informed was 104.

We covered the distance between 3:40 in the morning and 8:40 in the evening, including an hour and a quarter at Warrenton and five or ten minutes where we changed horses. . . .

After the first stages the horses were ordinary cavalry horses, and two of yours were hard

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This photograph captures President Roosevelt on a flat saddle and Mrs. Roosevelt on a side saddle out for a ride on Jackson Place near the White House.

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had on some light, fluffy evening gown and I don’t believe that Dolly Madison, even in her loveliest moments, ever looked more attractive than did Mrs. Roosevelt that moment, standing there, framed in the big doorway with the strong light on her and the wind blowing her clothes in every direction.13

animals to ride. . . . The conditions of the weather and roads materially increased the difficulty of the ride, for from Centreville a blinding sleet storm drove in our faces, and from Fairfax Court House we were in pitch darkness going over the frozen roads through the sleet storm. You as well as the rest of the party returned in fine condition, convincing me of the fact that the test provided for the army and navy was not excessive.15 If President Roosevelt thought that the success of his 100 mile ride had convinced his critics of the virtues of requiring a physical testing program, he was sadly mistaken. In a few months Roosevelt— the program’s driving force—was succeeded by President William Howard Taft, and the next year Rear Admiral Rixey retired. His successor gradually reduced the physical requirements for officers until they were suspended following U.S. entry into World War I. Not until a half century later did the navy finally recognize the importance of Roosevelt’s emphasis on physical fitness and make testing an essential part of military regulations.16 Still adamant in his belief that military officers should be in top physical condition, President Roosevelt wanted the importance of his remarkable 100 mile ride to remain alive in the memory of his countrymen. In a gesture of gratitude for the hospitality and cheer bestowed upon the four horsemen by the citizens of Warrenton, he ordered a very large photographic copy of the recently commissioned painting by Gari Melchers portraying him as a dauntless horseman. The beautifully framed 50 by 32 inch photograph of the painting was then given to the people of Warrenton. On the photograph the president penned a personal inscription, which says: To the City of Warrenton, Va. With the regards of Theodore Roosevelt. On Jan 13, 1909 at 3.40 a.m. I rode away from the White House in company with Surgeon General P. M. Rixey, USN, Capt. Archibald W. Butt, U.S.A. and Dr. C. T. Grayson, U.S.N. We reached Warrenton at 11 a.m.; took lunch; we were warmly and hospitably greeted by the people of Warrenton; and at 12:20 again mounted our horses and started back, reaching the White House at 8.40; last thirty miles we rode

with a driving sleet storm in our faces. We each rode four horses. T.R.17 The handsome gift from the president of the United States presently hangs in the Virginiana Room of the Fauquier County Public Library, just across the street from the Warren Green Hotel where the president and his party were so enthusiastically received. It was a smaller photographic copy of the Melchers painting of Roosevelt—not inscribed by the president—that was discovered in a Warrenton thrift store. Perhaps it was a gift from the president to a local admirer.

NOTES The author wishes to thank Rebecca Norris for her assistance in researching and editing this article.

1.

Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan Company, 1913), 54.

2.

Andre Sobocinski, “Teddy Roosevelt and the Navy’s PRT,” posted January 15, 2013, Navy Medicine Live (blog), online at www.navymedicine.navylive.dodlive.mil.

3.

“Test for Naval Officers,” Frederick (Maryland) Daily News, January 20, 1909, quoted in ibid.

4.

Quoted in ibid.

5.

Archie Butt to his sister-in-law Clara, January 12, 1909, The Letters of Archie Butt: Personal Aide to President Roosevelt, ed.

Lawrence F. Abbott (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1924), 284.

6.

Dr. John Cropper Wise and his wife resided at 100 Culpeper Street at the time of the president’s visit and introduced the president to the citizens of Warrenton at the Warren Green Hotel, January 13, 1909. Richard Gookin, March 2016, online at saintjameswarrenton.org/agneswisewindow

7.

Butt to his sister-in-law Clara, January 14, 1909, Letters of Archie Butt, ed. Abbott, 288–89.

8.

Ibid., 290.

9.

“98-Mile Ride, Bully, President Declares,” New York Times, January 14, 1909.

10.

Butt to his sister-in-law Clara, January 14, 1909, Letters of Archie Butt, ed. Abbott, 292.

11.

Ibid., 294.

12.

Ibid.

13.

Ibid., 294–95.

14.

“98-Mile Ride, Bully, President Declares.”

15.

Theodore Roosevelt to Archie Butt, January 15, 1909, Letters of Archie Butt, ed. Abbott, 295.

16.

Sobocinski, “Teddy Roosevelt and the Navy’s PRT.”

17.

Note that Warrenton is actually a town not a city; it was incorporated on January 5, 1810.

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Theodore Roosevelt’s Portrait by GARI MELCHERS w h e n t h e g r e a t Detroit railroad industrialist, Charles Lang Freer decided to donate his magnificent collection of East Asian, American, and Middle Eastern art to the Smithsonian Institution in 1906, it was the first and largest such gift from a private patron.

His initial bequest consisted of 2,250 cataloged art objects, $1 million dollars in funds to build a museum, and financial instruments to maintain and curate his collection. But the massive gift came with stipulations. The Freer Gallery of Art— named for its benefactor—would be prohibited from accepting gifts of art to be added to the collection, a device to ensure that the highest level of connoisseurship, established by Mr. Freer, would not be compromised. The museum would also be prohibited from exhibiting art that was not a part of the Freer’s permanent collection. Finally, once a work of art became part of the Freer collection it would not be permitted to leave the museum as a loan for any reason. Negotiations between Freer and Samuel P. Langley, the director of the Smithsonian Institution, regarding the restrictions associated with the gift, continued for about six months and finally stalled, until President Theodore Roosevelt successfully intervened on behalf of the donor. To express his gratitude, Charles Freer commissioned a lifesize painting of the president and wisely chose Gari Melchers, one of the most

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accomplished naturalistic portrait painters of the day, to create the portrait.

Melchers, christened Julius Garibaldi Melchers, was the son of a German-born American sculptor who displayed great aptitude for painting at an early age. He received formal instruction in Europe, where his works, shown in salons, received favorable attention, awards, and invitations for exclusive memberships in societies and associations of designers and artists. He won a Grand Prize at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle and was commissioned to paint the panels Peace and War for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Late in his career Melchers was awarded a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

President Roosevelt enthusiastically accepted Freer’s gift for a commissioned portrait and invited Melchers to the White House on Friday, February 28, 1908, for lunch. Afterward the president showed Melchers his riding habit, as he had decided he would be painted as a horseman. Melchers wrote in his diary, “He was very nice about everything and put on his riding clothes— and we discussed the question of black or yellow boots—cravat and waistcoat color—until everything was decided— and he arranged with me to come for work at nine Saturday morning.” The next day the president stood in the white house history quarterly

small dining room for a sketching session with the artist. Melchers noted in his diary, “The President never asks for a rest—and stands an hour or two without losing his place.” The sessions continued for more than a week. “The president is remarkable, full of strength and vigor, kind and considerate—and talks remarkably well on all subjects,” wrote Melchers on Sunday, March 1. On March 15, after the portrait was finished, Roosevelt wrote to Melchers, “I am delighted with the picture and am especially pleased that it should be done by an American artist.” Freer was pleased as well, saying it captured the “dignity, force and character” of the president. “Art is a language,” he wrote Melchers on March 19, 1908, “and your portrait will talk to the people through coming centuries.”

The monumental painting, Portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt, by Gari Melchers measures approximately 4 by 7 feet. Freer paid Melchers $2,500 for the portrait and donated to it the Freer Gallery of Art later in 1908.

SOURCES

Melchers’s diary entries and the letter to Melchers from Roosevelt, quoted in Michelle Crow-Dolby, “Painting a President,” posted May 9, 2014, Gari Melchers Home and Studio (blog), online at www.garimelchers.wordpress.com; Freer letter to Melchers, quoted in Joelle Seligson, “Thanks, Mr. President!” posted February 15, 2016, Freer/ Sackler (blog), online at www.freersackler.si.edu.

Also see Thomas Lawton and Linda Merrill, Freer: A Legacy of Art (Washington: D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Press, 1993), 189, nn. 42, 43.

F R E E R G A L L E R Y O F A R T, S M I T H S O N I A N I N S T I T U T I O N

CLIFFORD KRAINIK

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Finding the Lost Washington World AT FERRY FARM A Historic Site Reborn

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buildings and a plaque or two. One can almost see why Walmart planners turned their noses up at the site’s historical past.

But once word was out that the bulldozers and bright pink parking lot lights were coming to Ferry Farm, local folks and their nationwide allies rallied to the cause. The cry of “No Walmart by George” went out, and a coalition of groups, legislators, and Fredricksburg’s Kenmore Association came together to secure the land for preservation.

From that energy emerged the George Washington Foundation, which now owns and manages Ferry Farm. In less than two decades, the foundation has taken the old Washington farm from being nearly forgotten to being one of the gems in the crown of American historical study preservation and restoration.

previous spread

This view of the reconstructed residence at Ferry Farm was captured in spring 2018. below

Entitled Father, I Can Not Tell a Lie: I Cut the Tree, this engraving, made

by John C. McRae in 1867, illustrates the anecdote, always believed to be a fable,spread by Parson Weems to celebrate George Washington’s honesty. The Washington home at Ferry Farm is seen in the background.

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i t a l m o s t n e v e r happened. Had Walmart had its way in 1996, there would be a massive superduper center right next to the old farm where George Washington grew up on the Rappahannock River, opposite Fredericksburg, Virginia. In fairness, the land—still called by its nineteenth-century name of Ferry Farm—offered little in the way of visible links to the past. It was long famous for being the imagined site where a little boy chopped at his father’s cherry tree, but there was not much above ground from the years between 1738 and 1774, when Washingtons owned and lived on the land. Local activists had spent the better part of the century hoping some sort of preservation movement might come to life. But their best efforts were met with repeated failures, leaving behind only a few farm

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George Washington and the CHERRY TREE pa r s o n w e e m s b e g i n s this famous story by explaining that it was George Washington’s father who inspired a love of the truth in the future president, having told him, “I would ride fifty miles, my son, to see the little boy whose heart is so honest, and his lips so pure, that we may depend on every word he says.

O how lovely does such a child appear in the eyes of every body!

His parents doat on him; his relations glory in him . . . But, Oh! how different, George, is the case with the boy who is so given to lying, that nobody can believe a word he says! He is looked at with aversion wherever he goes, and parents dread to see him come among their children. Oh, George! my son! rather than see you come to this pass, dear as you are to my heart, gladly would I assist to nail you up in your little coffin, and follow you to your grave.’ . . . ‘Pa, (said George very seriously) do I ever tell lies?’ ‘No, George, I thank God you do not, my son; and I rejoice in the hope you never will.’”

ALAMY

The parson continues, “When George . . . was about six years old, he was made the wealthy master of a hatchet! of which, like most little boys, he was immoderately fond, and was constantly going about chopping every thing that came in his way.

One day, in the garden, where he often amused himself hacking his mother’s pea-sticks, he unluckily tried the edge of his hatchet on the body of a beautiful young English cherry-tree, which he barked so terribly, that I don’t believe the tree ever got the better of it. The next morning the old gentleman finding out what had befallen his tree . . . ‘George, said his father, do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry-tree yonder in the garden?’ . . . George staggered under it for a moment; but quickly recovered himself: and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, ‘I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.’ ‘Run to my arms, you dearest boy . . . glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son, is more worth than a thousand trees, though blossomed with silver, and their fruits of purest gold.’”

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Mason Locke (Parson) Weems, cleric, author, and book seller, wrote in 1800 The Life of Washington, which was the first biography published after Washington’s death in December 1799. It was incorporated into Washington lore, where it is remembered as a partially-invented romantic fantasy about the hero. Although it is often mocked, the book has never been abandoned. It went through many editions, selling thousands of copies. In the fifth edition, 1809, Weems added the famous story of the cherry tree, which we repeat here. The parson claimed that he had met an “old lady” who as a girl was often at Mount Vernon and there heard this story, an early example of Washington’s great nobility, already present when he was a child. Weems himself spent time with Washington at Mount Vernon in the general’s last years, so at least some of his tales were probably based in truth. The cherry tree lingered, particularly in classrooms, and was in vigorous use still in the 1950s. Who knows? It may have a touch of fact.

Weems (1759–1825), born in Maryland, was educated in London and ordained in the Church of England. Preaching in the Protestant Episcopal Church in America proved a financial trial, so he went to bookselling. From writing he made a fortune with his biography of the Swamp Fox and that of George Washington. He is buried in Virginia at his home Bel-Air, in the vicinity of Mount Vernon and Ferry Farm.

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features, but that work was all small scale and short term. Excavators produced a few eighteenth-century artifacts and even mapped out the foundations of what turned out to be the Washington family’s kitchen. Lots of questions remained.

In 2001, the George Washington Foundation began a full-scale, extensive study of the site. The goal was not just to locate the features and make sense of the artifacts but also, ultimately, to fully understand and form an authentic basis to re-create the old farmstead anew on the remains of the original.

Washington’s early years are the least understood part of his life, but curiosity about this formative period has always been strong. This long-standing desire to know more than what the documents show helped foster the large body of tales and fiction that flooded in to fill the historical silences.

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The Washington house site in the early stages of clearing for extraction and rebuilding.

COURTESY GARRY THOMPSON

All along, though, the promise lay not in what was in sight but what was hidden.

An 1833 painting of the land and several Civil War–era photographs made clear that nothing of the Washington farm lasted above ground long into the 1800s.

For two centuries, the acres had been used primarily for farming. That meant that somewhere under the fields the remains of the Washington home survived along with the subterranean remnants of all the outbuildings, trash pits, fence lines, cellars, and even forgotten burials of those who lived in the old family farmstead. The long process of saving the land from development gave vaulable time to carefully study this one-of-a-kind archaeological site. Ferry Farm promised to provide the first new information ever known about the young Washington and the world that nurtured him.

Preliminary excavations in the 1990s located a few of the farmstead’s key

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Excavation of the four cellars of the house yielded thousands of artifacts—pieces of ceilings, painted walls, and hearth; fragments of eighteenth-century pottery and other ceramics; glass shards, wig curlers (like those pictured above), and toothbrush handles made of bone. The cellars constituted a time capsule of evidence that helped the archaeologists confirm that they had indeed found the long-lost residence.

The first task was to actually locate the Washington home itself. The records made it clear that Augustine Washington bought the farm from the estate of William Strother and then moved his family—including his then six-year-old son George—to the Strother home in 1738. After Augustine’s death in 1743, George became the owner of the old place until he finally sold it in 1774.

Parson Mason Weems, the author of the cherry tree story, described the home from life in 1807 as being small and painted red.1 There had also been a string of sketches showing a low home with two great chimneys, but all rooted in hazy memories spun and respun.2 There was also some documentary commentary from Washington’s day.

The probate inventory of the family’s possessions at the time of Augustine Washington’s death described a home of four rooms and a passage on the white house history quarterly

first floor and two rooms above stairs— something rather larger than the modest bungalow of local memory.3 Added to that were a few contemporary references to there having been a fire at the house—presumably around 1740.

Many scholars had thought it burned to the ground.4 In the end, the archaeological evidence showed that there was indeed a fire, but far from being a homedestroying conflagration, it was small enough that the Washingtons could quickly repair the damage and even add a new wing to the house while the carpenters were on hand.

Excavations showed that the building sat very close to the edge of the bluffs dropping down to the riverside, but there was not much left to study of the old foundations. The builders had used cut Aquia sandstone, and later residents found that stone too useful to leave in the ground. Here and there, a few telltale sections showed where walls once ran and chimneys once sat. These revealed the structure to have measured roughly 30 by 51 feet, with quite large chimneys on each end and a third in the back room the Washingtons added on the back side.

There were few bricks and lots of nails, meaning that the building was wooden.

Bits of plaster even revealed some of the brick-red paint on the walls. At the center of the house was a large and very well made stone cellar sitting under the central passage. The stonework was expert enough to impress modern masons.

It also had a curious entry that placed the front door right above the cellar door, rather a simpler version of what can still be seen at Westmoreland County’s Stratford Hall, home of the Lee family.

Ferry Farm faced the river, allowing easy access to shipping and providing what Washington himself later described as a commanding view of the Rappahannock and the town on the opposite bank. Perching a residence at the edge of a tall bluff also was a way of advertising a family’s presence on

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The family repaired broken ceramics and made do with table settings well behind the current fashion—a genuine concern for the widowed Mary Ball Washington, who was then working to ensure the best possible marriages for her children. But Mrs. Washington was singularly adept at making high-style with little. Fancy embroidery tools and tea sets show that she was doing all she could to train daughter Betty, George’s younger sister, in the genteel arts of gentry women. This education paid off when Betty married into the locally prominent Lewis family. It was not until George had moved on and begun to make his fortune as a surveyor that proper fashionability returned to the homestead, backed up by his new purchasing power.

Anyone dining with the family would have encountered fare a bit different from that on offer at other gentry homes. Thousands of animal bones

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This painting entitled View from the Site of the Old Mansion of the Washington Family, by John Gatsby Chapman captures the foundations of Washington’s home at Ferry Farm in 1833 and a view of the growing city of Fredericksburg across the Rappahannock River. opposite

This c. 2017 aerial view of Ferry Farm includes the recreated Washington home and surrounding farmscape that visitors see today.

COURTESY OF MOUNT VERNON LAD IES ’ A SSOC IATION

the land. The Washington house cut an impressive form when viewed from the river below, even though, in fact, it was made from rather plain and simple materials. There was a lesson in this— presentation mattered—and it would seem that young George learned it well.

Washington was a lifelong master at using landscape, architecture, clothing, and accoutrements to great effect.

Some of that awareness must have begun with seeing how his father’s home looked quite the mansion to visitors coming up the path from the dock.

Excavations unearthed more than three-quarters of a million artifacts from over one thousand years of people living and hunting along the river here. These broken bits of ceramic, metal, and glass had lots to say about the Washingtons’ standard of living. Augustine’s death took a financial toll on the family, and the 1740s were hard times.

GOOGLE EARTH

recovered from trash pits showed that the family had a taste for wild game, far more than others of their class. Additionally, the enslaved Africans living in the work yards and in part of the main home ate wild game in the same high proportions, although they were more likely to have turtles and raccoons to supplement their venison than were Mary and her children. Was this a diet of necessity, or one of preference? Given George’s time and interests in the Appalachians and the then-still-wild western Shenandoah Valley, it is tempting to imagine him bringing home a taste for deer over domestic pigs and cattle.

The area behind the residence— stretching out to what is now Route 3—was filled with work yards, utilitarian buildings, and the homes of the slaves who did work ranging from farm labor to skilled crafts and cooking.

There was even someone skilled in the

maintenance of fashionable wigs, as evidenced by the unusually large number of ceramic wig curlers on the site.

These Africans were the life’s blood of Ferry Farm, and even though their names would never appear on a deed, this was very much their home. The tremendous presence of artifacts relating to them show how settled they were in their lives at Ferry Farm.

It has been nearly two decades since the study of Ferry Farm began in earnest.

Visitors today will see a museum, a working laboratory, a selection of artifacts, and a full-size re-created Washington home based on state-of-the-art excavation and architectural study. For the first time since the end of the eighteenth century, it has become possible to reenter the farmscape where Washington came of age and reflect on the many connections between this unique place and the larger American story. white house history quarterly

NOTES 1.

M. L. Weems, The Life of Washington, ed.

Peter Onuf (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe Press, 1996), 6–7.

2.

Augustine Washington, probate inventory, recorded in King George County, Virginia, July 1, 1743.

3.

Augustine Washington’s probate inventory was transcribed and drawn as a plan in the 1930s by the George Washington Birth Bicentennial Commission. A copy can be found at kenmore.org. See also: Philip Levy, Where the Cherry Tree Grew: The Story of Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013), and Idem., George Washington Written Upon the Land: Nature, Myth, Myth, Memory, and Landscape (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2015).

4.

There had always been some question about the Washington house fire. A 1741 letter to Augustine Washington referred to fire, but biographers did not agree on which of Augustine’s three homes had burned and to what degree. Jack Warren argued that the fire was at Ferry Farm and that it had consumed the home in “The Childhood of George Washington,” Northern Neck of Virginia Historical Magazine 49:1 (1999): 5791.

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PRESIDENT James Monroe’s I Street Residence Home of the Arts Club of Washington B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

JUDITH VIGGERS NORDIN

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Arts Club of Washington since 1918, is the highlight for Washington visitors, especially with a child in the lead. But that day our guests’ enthusiasm was an inspiration for those of us who work diligently at preserving the legacy of this presidential property.

In the world of presidential sites, one never knows when a young girl will knock on the door, or anyone else wondering about her favorite president.

THE BEGINNINGS OF A GRACIOUS HOUSE The house at 2017 I Street NW used to be the largest structure on the block between Twentieth and Twenty-First Streets in Washington City; now, in 2018, it has become the smallest, dwarfed by highrise buildings. In 1802, Timothy Caldwell, a builder from Philadelphia, purchased this parcel of land just to the east of Washington Circle, where the streets were barely defined. The swampy property was a part of a land grant that included the tract of farmland known as Widow’s Mite, originally part of

President James Monroe, below left in an 1819 portrait by Samuel F. B. Morse, lived in his own house on I Street during the rebuilding of the White House following the fire of 1814. Six months into the first year of his administration, he wrote impatiently to architect James Hoban, “I hope that you will soon finish the President’s House.” The letter (below) is now on display at the Arts Club, a gift of Albert H. Small.

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o n e d ay i n the summer of 2017 a 10-year-old girl, traveling from the Midwest, came to the door of the Monroe House at 2017 I Street NW. In tow, as her fellow travelers, were her parents, two grandmothers, and two siblings. She asked if she could see the inside of President James Monroe’s House for she knew he had lived here long ago. The rest of her family could wait for her, but since James Monroe was her “favorite president,” she “really needed to see where he lived.” Her favorite president? Really? Not George Washington of cherry tree fame or Honest Abe? Oh, no. Although she had learned about the Monroe Doctrine, it was the Louisiana Purchase that had made an impression on her in the just-finished fourth grade. Her whole family then trooped through the house while the girl seemed genuinely awed at actually being in her hero’s Washington, D.C., home. They all left with smiles and gratitude for the tour.

It is not often that our 212-year-old structure on I Street, which has been owned by and served as the

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Montgomery County, Maryland. He paid $492.19.1 A “competent property owner and developer,” Caldwell set out to build “the most beautiful House in the new Capital City, and the most elegant south of his native Philadelphia.”2 Purchasing additional land, Caldwell added to his original structure finishing in 1806 a handsome twenty-room house with a two-storied facade with dormers on a third level. In 1877, Professor Cleveland Abbe, a later owner, further expanded the house by installing full rooms into the front third-level and dormers of the attic.

Aside from the third level the exterior of the house looks much the same today as when it was built, boasting a wide frontage on I Street NW. The handsome Georgian-style, early nineteenth-century red brick is set in Flemish bond with a white belt course and a centered sandstone keystone and arch over the richly carved arched doorway of wood topped with a fan or lunette transom. The arch is repeated in the interior entrance hall and vestibule, partitioned later to provide a storm entrance. Four

window bays on the front facade with repeating splayed keystones complete the simple but elegant presentation of the southern-facing structure.

Ironically, Caldwell never lived in his house of sociability and high fashion. He sold it in 1808 to Gideon Granger, postmaster general from 1801 to 1814, and bought it back in 1813. It would appear that Caldwell built it strictly for investment, gambling on the new hub of government attracting an affluent class of officials needing lodging.3 Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, interesting and prominent people lived in what is now known as the James Monroe House, including especially John Quincy Adams’s son, Senator Charles Francis Adams, and Cleveland Abbe, a physicist and astronomer who essentially started the first United States Weather Bureau with his prognostication methods.

After renting for two years, The Arts Club purchased the property from the Abbe family in 1918, shortly after Professor Abbe’s death. It was Abbe,

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Once the largest house on the block, President Monroe’s elegant twenty-room house is now dwarfed by surrounding office buildings on I Street. The splendid doorway, handcarved in wood and surmounted by an arch of Aquia quarry sandstone, anchors the house defiantly on the site it has occupied for two centuries.

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JAMES MONROE, FIRST LESSEE, 1811 Appointed secretary of state by President James Madison in 1811, Monroe, with his wife Elizabeth, moved to the District of Columbia, where they rented 2017 I Street throughout his tenure in the cabinet. That included a period in which he assumed the duties of secretary of war, late in the War of 1812, following the British invasion.6 Before and during the war and for the first months of his presidency, Monroe held meetings in offices on the eastern side

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of the house, in rooms built for this purpose. The addition was removed after Monroe’s departure in October 1817 for the President’s House, which was finally habitable again following its burning during the war. Thus except for visits to their Albemarle and Loudoun County properties in Virginia, the Monroes lived at 2017 I Street for six years.

This house was, of necessity, the center of Monroe’s inaugural activities on March 4, 1817.

Invited guests attending the inauguration and members of the militia gathered at O’Neale’s Hotel on I Street between Twentieth and Twenty-First Streets to make their way to 2017 I Street and then accompany the president-elect to the Capitol, where he took the Oath of Office.7 The inaugural reception after the ceremony was held in the upstairs drawing room (now the parlor) of the I Street house. For the next six months Timothy Caldwell’s handsome brick house served as the nation’s temporary Executive Mansion.

Entertainments at this temporary Executive Mansion reflected the Monroes’ French taste and style. Elizabeth Kortright Monroe was by all accounts beautiful, educated, and an extraordinary hostess. Her dinner invitations were sought after and coveted. As she assumed the role of first lady, her appearance and demeanor were often described as elegant and refined. Her graciousness

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James Monroe is depicted departing his house on I Street for his 1817 inauguration in this bronze basrelief made by sculptor Pam Foss in 1990. The 14-foot wide work is now appropriately displayed in the back garden of the Arts Club of Washington, Monroe’s former home.

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who, in addition to adding the top floor, redesigned the back garden. To honor him, the house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976.4 Professor Abbe’s distinguished career inspired the National Public Radio science journalist and author David Baron who happened by the Monroe House in the summer of 2016. The journalist declared that while he was a respectful admirer of President Monroe, it was in fact Professor Cleveland Abbe’s house he came to visit. Abbe was an “eclipse chaser” in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and in anticipation of the rare solar eclipse of 2017, the journalist was writing a book about eclipses that would feature Abbe prominently.5 Again, historical curiosity, different levels of interest, and individual fascinations draw visitors to this unique dwelling.

They are a reward for its preservation.

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One of many original architectural details remaining in the house, this Federal period carved wood and composition fireplace mantel is in the drawing room (above right), where President James Monroe’s inaugural reception was held in 1817.

may have contributed to setting a different tone for the sometimes rough-and-tumble capital city. That tone carried over farther into politics. The new administration’s reconciliation of partisan factions was characterized in a Boston newspaper as “The Era of Good Feelings.”8 For the rebuilt President’s House, the Monroes ordered fine French furniture like that they had admired during James Monroe’s two tenures as minister to France in 1794–96 and in 1803, when he helped negotiate the Louisiana Purchase.9 A few pieces remain in the White House to the current day, and others have been returned.9 Recently, on another historic adventure, a visitor to the Arts Club asked to see the Federal carved wood and “composition” (mortar mixed with plaster) fireplace mantel. Several of the same symmetrical, neoclassical fireplaces had been in the White House before the fire. This applied decoration, as in the White House, cast in composition in the Adamesque style, is attributed to the Baltimore ornament maker George Andrews, originally from Dublin.10

THE ARTS CLUB OF WASHINGTON, BEGINNING 1916 The Arts Club of Washington was founded on April 7, 1916, in the studio of the artist Henry Kirke BushBrown, on G Street NW. Its goals were appreciating

and perpetuating the arts, particularly painting, sculpture, and drama. Its ideals were lofty. “The art of right living is the one great fine art,” said Mitchell Carroll, in a report on the club’s activities in 1921.

“The application of what is finest and best in art to our daily life is an essential element of culture.” At its founding meeting, Carroll explained, the club voted “to secure, if possible, a colonial house for the home of the Club. For this purpose the President named a special committee, who were so fortunate to secure the old Monroe residence on I Street.”11 The twenty-five founders included both men and women, highly unusual for its time, and, as the following description reveals, they were not always in agreement.

I went to the first meeting which was in the spring of 1916, at 7:00 p.m. It was held in the front room right off the entrance, and fifteen or twenty people were present. The house was very shabby, dingy. It had no furnishings.

The upstairs rooms were empty, and the whole place seemed spooky. A lot of folding chairs had been rented for the meeting, and Miss . . . and I sat in the last row, against the wall.

The paper was peeling off the wall in strips, it was to be repapered. The lighting was so dim we couldn’t see very well; it may have been

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As Carroll recounted, members donated pictures, books, and statuary, which were sold to fund the renovation and furnishing of the Monroe House and to create a garden in the backyard. The Monroe House proved attractive and congenial, and the site of great sociability. The club held concerts, lectures, exhibitions, receptions, poetry readings, dramatic presentations, and Thursday night dinners. Membership quickly grew to more than four hundred.13 Today a portrait of Bush-Brown, the club’s first president, hangs over the fireplace in the Monroe House’s first floor parlor. It was painted by his wife, Margaret Lesley Bush-Brown, a student of Thomas Eakins. Bush-Brown was a recognized sculptor who was commissioned to produce huge outdoor statuary in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington. He was frequently referred to as “The Father of American Sculpture.” His 1904 large bust of Abraham Lincoln sits in the Arts Club library.

Bush-Brown was an instrumental force in the success of the Arts Club of Washington. His commitment to art as a means for the betterment of humankind influenced the club for many years.14 Another notable Arts Club member was Clifford K. Berryman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning political cartoonist who is best known for his depiction of President Theodore Roosevelt refusing to shoot a bear while on a hunting trip in Mississippi woodlands. The image became the “Teddy Bear,” portrayed in Berryman’s cartoons and re-created as a stuffed animal. Berryman drew for the Washington

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Post and the Washington Evening Star.15 His caricature likenesses of early club presidents also hang in the club library.

Other prominent club members included the artists Ellen Day Hale and Mathilde Mueden Leisenring; the glass artist and jeweler Charles Comfort Tiffany; Duncan Phillips, founder of the Phillips Gallery; Alice Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt’s eldest daughter; First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; the cellist Hans Kindler, founder of the National Symphony Orchestra and president of the Arts Club; and broadcaster Fulton J. Lewis, another Arts Club president. The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and the actress Tallulah Bankhead visited frequently.

To accomodate the growth in its membership and activities, in 1929 the Arts Club purchased the adjoining house at 2015 I Street. Known as the MacFeely addition, it provided meeting rooms, a natural light painting studio, and, most important, a gallery and stage. It also made room for upstairs boarding rooms, some of which were occupied until the 1960s. During the height of the Great Depression, the rental income from boarders helped defray some of the cost of the newly acquired space. The MacFeely House has been recognized on the National Register of Historic Places since 1989.

This portrait of the first president of the Arts Club, Henry Kirke BushBrown, made by his wife Margaret Lesley Bush-Brown, hangs above the fireplace in the first floor parlor of the Monroe House.

THE MONROE HOUSE AND THE ARTS CLUB OF WASHINGTON TODAY Today the mission of the Arts Club remains much the same as it did when it was founded, just over a century ago, but its interests have expanded to include additional artistic disciplines, including music, dance, architecture, photography, cinematography, and the digital arts. One continuing and pertinent interest is historic preservation. The Arts Club is proud that the Preservation Roundtable has held its monthly meetings of information exchange and lunch at the Monroe House for fifty continuous years.

Outreach programs have expanded as well.

The Arts Club presents a national annual literary prize for nonfiction arts writing, the Marfield Prize.

College-age students are honored with an annual scholarship program. Both of the programs have developed into master classes in two local secondary schools, the Duke Ellington School for the Arts and the School Without Walls. Programs available

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candles. . . . Mr. Bush-Brown, wearing the blue smock seen in his portrait on our library wall, (or one like it) was presiding. But there were two opposing groups, one led by . . . a fiery Irishman, and the other by Mr . . . They and their followers were convinced of the rightness of their respective ideas, and they shouted each other down, which irritated Mr. BushBrown, who hammered his gavel, bang, bang, bang, at frequent intervals. There was quite an uproar. Miss . . . , a very proper English woman, quite dismayed, said “Oh, dear, I don’t think I want to join this Club, they can’t agree on anything. . . . I was exhausted after two hours of this noise and combat and didn’t think any Club that started this way, would last. But we did join, and the Club has developed beautifully and I am very proud to be a member.12

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NOTES

A portrait of Arts Club member Clifford K. Berryman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning political cartoonist, hangs in the Arts Club library.

The letter from James Monroe to James Madison, May 18, 1803, concerning the Louisiana Purchase, is published in Quotations of James Monroe, comp. Daniel Preston and Heidi Stello, (Fredericksburg, Va., Ash Lawn–Highland, 2010) 66.

right

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The boot scraper to the left of the Monroe House front door may have been used by President Monroe when this area of the city was known as “The Mud Hole.”

to the public include Friday noon concerts, piano jazz concerts, literary evenings, and the multidisciplinary “Evenings with Extraordinary Artists.” First Friday art openings (with complementary wine) are always open to the public and free of charge.

Today, as in years past, the club offers a respite from politics in a very political city. It draws much of its character, tradition, and spirit from the importance of its historic connection to James and Elizabeth Monroe.

We like to think that we carry forward some of their gracious poise and that we entertain with their charm. While providing wide-ranging access to the great satisfaction afforded by the arts, at the same time, we inhabit this historic property responsibly. The Washington journalist Hope Ridings Miller has stated that “no other organization has headquarters with a more conspicuous link to history than the Arts Club.”16 Today the United States Department of State, The George Washington University, and the World Bank are our neighbors in an area of the Federal City was once derided as “The Mud Hole” by certain congressmen.17 It might be no accident that just to the left of Monroe House’s front door is a boot scraper. The fifth president of the United States used this very scraper two hundred years ago. For us it serves as a reminder of the storied past of our presidential house.

1.

Maud Burr Morris, “An Old Washington Mansion,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 21 (1918): 116.

2.

William Carmichael, foreword, Archives of Arts Club of Washington (Washington, D.C.: American Federation of the Arts, 1916).

3.

Morris, “An Old Washington Mansion,” 117.

4.

Truman Abbe, Professor Abbe and the Isobars (New York: Vantage Press, 1955).

5.

David Baron, American Eclipse (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 150–74.

6.

Daniel Preston, James Monroe, 2nd ed. (Charlottesville, Va.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2011), 2–3; Harry Ammon, James Monroe: The Quest for National Identity, pbk. ed.

(Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1990), 289–379.

7.

Article in Washington Star, 1917. The Franklin Hotel was owned and run by William O’Neale and later by John Gadsby, previously the tavern-keeper in Alexandria and Baltimore.

The Marquis de Lafayette stayed at the Franklin during his American tour of 1824–25.

8.

The term was coined by the Boston Columbian Centinel on July 12, 1817, during Monroe’s goodwill tour.

9.

Ulrich Leben, “Furnishings in Paris: From the Directory to the Coronation of Napoleon,” White House History, no. 44 (Winter 2017): 16–27; Leslie B. Jones, “James Monroe’s White House State Furniture à la Française,” ibid., 28–39. See also Elizabeth Dinschel, “First Lady Lou Henry Hoover and the First White House Catalog,” White House History, no. 45 (Spring 2017): 31–39, and especially pages 25–39 of “White House Furnishings,” the inventory prepared for First Lady Lou Hoover by Dare Stark McMullin in 1932 and reproduced therein.

10.

David J. Black, “An Infusion of Scotch: The Scottish Neoclassical Mantel and Its Federal American Cousin” (lecture, Historic Charleston Foundation, Charleston, S.C., October 2016), online at digital.nls.uk. On “composition,” see William Seale, The President’s House, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2008), 76.

11.

Mitchell Carroll, “Activities of the Arts Club of Washington,” Art and Archaeology 12, no. 2 (1921): 86.

12.

Helen Wharton, “Memory of the First Organizational Meeting of the Arts Club,” Archives of the Arts Club of Washington.

13.

Carroll, “Activities of the Arts Club of Washington,” 86. See also George Julian Zolnay, “Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Arts Club,” Art and Archaeology 12, no. 2 (1921): 89.

14.

See also the entry for Henry Kirke Bush-Brown in the Dictionary of American Biography, copy in Archives of Arts Club of Washington.

15.

Jessie Kratz, “Clifford K. Berryman: The Dean of American Cartoonists,” White House History, no. 48 (Winter 2018): 14–29.

16.

Hope Ridings Miller, Great Houses of Washington, D.C. (New York: C. N. Potter, 1929).

17.

Morris, “An Old Washington Mansion,” 119.

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PRESIDENT MCKINLEY’S Family Homestead in Canton, Ohio The First Ladies National Historic Site PAT R I C I A A . K R I D E R

GETTY IMAGES

in the heart of downtown Canton, Ohio, stands the exquisitely restored Saxton– McKinley House, which in its stately elegance seems at odds with the concrete commercial buildings surrounding it. This mansard-roofed second-empired inspired American gem was the family home of First Lady Ida Saxton McKinley and the private residence in which she and her husband, President William McKinley, lived the longest during their marriage. This presidential home, which was never owned by the president, has welcomed many dignitaries in addition to happy family events such as weddings and sad gatherings such as funerals. It has experienced the laughter of children, the sociability of parties and receptions, and eventually the neglect that almost led to its demise.

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Canton, in northeast Ohio, had a population of less than two thousand in 1836 when George Dewalt, Ida McKinley’s maternal grandfather, purchased property in the town and built a two-story Federal-style home that faced what is now Fourth Street SW. He lived there with his wife, Christiana Harter Dewalt, and his three children John, Catharine (“Kate”), and Harriet.1 Upon the death of George Dewalt in 1850, his daughter Kate, her husband James Saxton, and their three children—Ida, Mary (“Pina”), and George—moved into the Dewalt home to live with Christiana.

THE SAXTON ERA Kate and James Saxton raised their children in what was by this time known as the Saxton House. James was a

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successful businessman who prospered in his many undertakings, including owning a local bank. He became one of the wealthiest men in Canton and needed a home suited to his success. Around 1865, he expanded the Saxton House substantially, more than doubling its size, even though he did not own the house—it was owned by his mother-inlaw. The three-story Victorian addition to the east side of the original house included a formal parlor and family parlor, bedrooms on the second floor, and a third floor ballroom that became a very popular social gathering place. He also added a curved mahogany grand staircase that went all the way up to the third floor and turned the front entrance to Market Avenue South, a fashionable address in mid-nineteenth-century Canton. The house was considered to white house history quarterly

be of the Second Empire style, with a mansard roof, dormer windows, and sculptural detail. There was also a wide porch across the front and north sides of the house.2 The Saxtons believed strongly in education for both boys and girls and made sure that their children had the best education possible. Ida attended schools in Canton, Cleveland, and in Pennsylvania, where her father told her teachers that he wanted her to have a practical education with courses in math and bookkeeping in addition to those normally taught to a young woman of that time. After Ida and her sister Mary completed their education, their parents sent them on a six-month Grand Tour of Europe, a stylish undertaking for wealthy young women in those days.

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THE FIRST GENERATION

right

and lived only four months. Ida and William were devastated. They no longer wanted to live in the home where their child died so they moved into the Saxton House with Ida’s father James and brother George.4 James sold the house on Market Avenue North. Then, in 1875, the McKinleys’ 3-year-old daughter, Katie, contracted a childhood disease and died. The stress of losing both children and her mother, along with a difficult labor with her second child, took a serious toll on Ida’s health.

She developed symptoms of epilepsy and had a weakened immune system that plagued her for the rest of her life.

A November 1896 carte de visite featured three photos (right) of William and Ida McKinley and the house on Market Avenue North where McKinley conducted the front porch campaign.

During the years that the McKinleys were in Washington, D.C., Ida McKinley’s sister Mary lived in the Saxton house with her family, which grew to include seven children (below in c. 1888 ) and the house became known as the Barber House. opposite

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The family parlor in the Saxton Home, photographed in 1919, shows the neogothic architecture of the room and the assembly of personal memorabilia typical in parlors of the time.

THE MCKINLEY-BARBER YEARS IN THE SAXTON HOUSE After returning from her Grand Tour, Ida Saxton went to work in her father’s bank, raising more than a few eyebrows in Canton since commerce was not seen as an appropriate undertaking for a proper woman. The ever progressive James Saxton, however, openly stated that he wanted Ida to be able to take care of herself and to marry only if she wanted to marry, not because she needed a husband to take care of her.3 Ida was beautiful, vivacious, and popular. She and her sister entertained frequently in the expansive third floor ballroom, and Ida had many suitors.

Eventually, she met the young attorney William McKinley, who had moved to Canton from Niles, Ohio. Ida and William fell in love and were married on January 25, 1871.

James Saxton bought a house on Market Avenue North, about twelve blocks from his residence, and leased it to the newlyweds. Ida and William welcomed a baby daughter, Katie, on Christmas Day in 1871, and in 1873, Ida became pregnant again. Then began a difficult time. Ida’s beloved mother, Kate, died suddenly, and Ida’s second child, baby Ida, was born prematurely white house history quarterly

After William McKinley was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1876, the couple began spending a substantial amount of time each year in Washington, D.C., leaving James Saxton once again alone in the large house with only his son George. At this point Ida’s sister Mary moved back into the Saxton House, now with her husband Marshall Barber and their children, who eventually grew in number to seven. Whenever they were in Canton, Ida and William stayed at the Saxton House with James, James’s second wife, Hettie, whom he married in 1882, the Barber family, and occasionally Ida’s brother George.

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William McKinley kept a law office (left c. 1885) on the third floor of the Saxton House on Market Avenue South (below c. 1880).

when he was in town. It was in this office that he wrote the Tariff Act of 1890, also known as the McKinley Tariff, that helped to launch him into the national political spotlight.8 When McKinley became a candidate for president in 1896, however, he did not conduct his famous front porch campaign from the Saxton House. Rather, he leased the home on Market Avenue North, where he and Ida had spent the first years of their marriage, for the express purpose of running his campaign.

The famous “front porch campaign” thus took place from this smaller, rented stage, rather than from the mansion that was actually his home.

Following McKinley’s inauguration as president, Ida’s nieces Mary, Ida,

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Especially as the Barber children grew and McKinley’s political success increased, the Saxton House became a very popular center for the family. Mary and Marshall Barber and their daughters entertained frequently at the home, as did Ida and William when they were in town.5 In 1880, when Canton hosted the Soldiers and Sailors Reunion, President Rutherford B. Hayes and presidential candidate James A. Garfield, and their wives, stayed with the McKinleys in the Saxton House.

According to a September 1, 1880, edition of the Cincinnati Repository “The residence of Mr. James Saxton, also of Congressman McKinley, was besieged from early in the morning by crowds of veterans and others determined to see ‘the two Presidents’ and unwilling to be satisfied until both Hayes and Garfield had appeared on the piazza.”6 Many other dignitaries visited McKinley at the Saxton House over the years, and some made speeches from the expansive front porch. The residents of Canton had the opportunity to meet and hear from such notables General William T. Sherman, James G. Blaine, and Salmon P. Chase.7 William McKinley had a law office on the third floor of the Saxton House, which he used to conduct business

CL OCKWISE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS /LIBRARY OF CONGRESS / CORBIS

President McKinley enjoyed the front porch of the Saxton home on Market Street South where he was photographed in a rocking chair in 1901 (top left), but he conducted his famous 1896 campaign from the porch of the rented house on nearby Market Street North. An estimated 750,000 people traveled to Canton to hear him speak (right and top right). white house history quarterly

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William McKinley’s assassination in 1901 sent a devastated but strong Ida back to Canton. She took up residence in the honeymoon home on Market Avenue North, which William had purchased in 1899, planning to keep it for retirement after he completed his second term as president.12 At first the widow refused all invitations, but did make an occasional visit to her sister at the old Saxton House as well as frequent visits to the graves of her husband and daughters.13 The weddings of Ida’s nieces Mary, Ida, and Kate were held in the Saxton House, which by that time had come to be known as the Barber House. Ida McKinley attended Mary Barber’s wedding, one of the few social invitations that she accepted.14 Ida died in 1907, and her sister Mary died ten years later, in 1917.

Mary’s husband, Marshall Barber died the next year. Their youngest daughter Kate, her husband Henry Belden, and their three children moved into the old house on Market Avenue South and lived there until it was sold in 1919.15

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Following the assassination of President McKinley the widowed first lady returned to Canton to live in the home on Market Avenue North, which by this time had been repurchased by the president and enlarged as seen in the 2-cent postcard (below). She remained there until her death in 1907. The home was eventually demolished.

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and Kate Barber were frequent visitors to the White House, along with their mother Mary. Their closeness to the president and first lady, who stayed at the Saxton House whenever they were in Canton, increased the relatives’ popularity, and invitations to attend functions at the Saxton House were coveted by the residents of Canton.9 Scandal rocked the lives of the McKinleys and the Barbers in 1898 when Ida and Mary’s brother George was shot and killed, allegedly by a jealous female lover. The woman was arrested and tried but was acquitted of the murder. The McKinleys traveled to Canton and attended the funeral, which was held in the Saxton House.10 Two years later another funeral was held in the house, that of young James Barber, the oldest son of Mary and Marshall Barber. He had served in the SpanishAmerican War and was on duty in Hong Kong when he contracted typhoid and died. The president and first lady were unable to attend due to illness.11

Ida McKinley’s family lived in the Saxton–McKinley House until it was sold in 1919. The new owners added storefronts and during the next sixty years the building housed a dry goods store, a restaurant-bar, a barber shop, and, on the upper floors, a boarding house, and even a brothel. The original mansard roof can be seen above the storefronts in this c. 1970 photograph.

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THE COMMERCIAL YEARS AND RESCUE FROM DEMOLITION The new owners of the old Saxton House almost immediately turned it into commercial space. They added storefronts and began to rent to a variety of businesses. Ida’s nephew, John Barber leased an office in his old family home. In the ensuing years, the building housed a dry goods store, a restaurant-bar, a barber shop, and, on the upper floors, a boarding house, and a brothel. By the 1970s the building had fallen into disrepair, and the stately old home was scarcely recognizable. As part of a plan to revitalize downtown Canton, it was scheduled for demolition.

Then a Saxton family member came to the rescue. Marshall Belden Sr., the oldest son of Ida’s youngest niece Kate, had often walked by the old building with dismay. He remembered living in the house as a young boy and even being scolded by his grandmother (Ida’s sister Mary) for sliding down the banister of the grand staircase. He appealed to the mayor of Canton to spare the house, as it was the only residence remaining in white house history quarterly

Canton with ties to President McKinley (the house on Market Avenue North had been razed in 1935).16 The mayor agreed to rescind the demolition order but told Belden that he had to restore the house.17 Belden went to work immediately.

He had the commercial storefronts torn off the old house and restored its exterior, repairing brick work on the front and south sides, replicating windows and doors, and re-creating the porch that once wrapped across the front and down the north side. He also nominated the house for the National Register of Historic Places.18 After spending approximately $1 million on the exterior renovation, Belden put the house on the market, first for sale and eventually up for auction, but there were no buyers.19 Belden then, with the help of local Congressman Ralph Regula, convinced the National Park Service to purchase the property.20 The Park Service acknowledged the connection of the home to William McKinley but decided it was not strong enough to establish it as the William McKinley National Historic Site.

Instead an agreement was formulated

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that allowed the house to be used for office space for the Stark Community Foundation and other nonprofit organizations. The agreement also stipulated that the formal parlor, the ballroom, and McKinley’s third floor office be open to the public. Local foundations raised funds to renovate the interior, initally restoring the offices and public rooms to a Federal period style. The National First Ladies Library redecorated in Victorian style several years later. The first tenants moved into the house in 1992.21

The current tenant is the National First Ladies’ Library, founded in 1995 by Mary Regula, the wife of Congressman Regula, to assemble a comprehensive

bibliography on first ladies and educate the public about their important contributions. It seemed fitting that this organization be housed in a home of a first lady, but Regula and the board members did not think the Federalstyle decor appropriate for the era of Ida Saxton McKinley. They raised funds to redecorate the public rooms in a Victorian style that was likely in accord with the decor of the home when the Saxtons, McKinleys, and Barbers lived there in the late nineteenth century.

There were very few photographs of the interior rooms of the house in that era, so the rooms were decorated with wallpapers, carpets, and furnishings that were appropriate to the time.

The Saxton McKinley House was officially dedicated as the National First Ladies’ Library in June 1998 and a limited number of rooms were open to the

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THE NATIONAL FIRST LADIES’ LIBRARY AND FIRST LADIES NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

Period furnishings and wallpapers were used during the renovation of the Saxton-McKinley House, and a limited number of spaces, including President McKinley’s third floor office (below) and the curving staircase (right) were initally made open to the public for tours.

Repository, June 29, 1889, 4.

public for tours.22 Eventually all of the other organizations moved out of the house, and additional rooms were redecorated in the Victorian style. In October 2000, President Bill Clinton signed a bill establishing the Saxton McKinley House as the First Ladies National Historic Site.23 Today the restored Saxton McKinley House is open to the public and serves as an example of the private lives of presidents, first ladies, and their families.

6.

“Canton’s Great Reunion,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, September 1, 1880, 1.

7.

“Girl of His Choice.”

8.

McKinley, Boy and Man,” Cleveland Leader and Herald, June 21, 1894, 12.

9.

“The Violet Club,” Canton Repository, January 31, 1897, 3; “Mrs. Henry S. Belden, Jr., Niece of McKinley, Dies,” Canton Repository, August 11, 1949, 1; “Plain Words: McKinley Will Speak Them in the Country Today,” Cleveland Leader, June 29, 1896, 1; “At Canton: Townsmen Gave the President a Royal Welcome,” Cleveland Leader, September 2, 1899, 3; “Box Party,” Canton Repository, August 11, 1899, 5; “McKinley Leaves for Washington,” Canton Repository, September 2, 1899; “McKinley at Canton,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 25, 1900.

10.

“McKinley Coming,” Columbus Dispatch, October 8, 1898, 2; “Sad Home Coming: President and Mrs. McKinley Reach Canton from Washington,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 10, 1898, 1.

11.

“At Rest: Funeral of Lieutenant James S. Barber,” Canton Repository, January 11, 1901, 1.

12.

“Home Sweet Home: President McKinley Now Owns the Home He Has Made Historic,” Canton Repository, August 6, 1899, 1.

13.

“Mrs. M’Kinley Did Not Omit Visit to Her Husband’s Tomb: For the First Time Since the Tragedy Spent a Holiday away from Home,” Cincinnati Post, December 25, 1902, 5.

14.

“Miss Mary Barber, Late President’s Niece, Becomes Wife of Major Ralph Hartzell of Denver: Mrs. McKinley at the Wedding,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 31, 1902, 1; “Son of Judge Day Takes a Bride,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 25, 1903, 5.

15.

“Distinguished Mourners and Relatives Return to Homes in Sorrow,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 27, 1907, 2; “Mrs. Mary S. Barber Long Leader in Welfare Work,” Canton Repository, July 1, 1917, 8.

16.

Lawrence L. Knutson, Away from the White House: Presidential Escapes, Retreats, and Vacations (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2014), 150–53.

17.

“Through the Years with the Saxtons,” Akron Beacon Journal, August 30, 1990.

18.

Richard G. Ellers, “McKinley’s Wife’s Home Getting Facelift,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 17, 1980.

19.

“Saxton-Barber House Still on Auction Block,” Akron Beacon Journal, October 1, 1988, A6–7.

20.

“House OKs Funds for McKinley Home, Park,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 4, 1989, 4B.

21.

Richard G. Ellers, “Mansion Will Be Restored: Saxton House McKinley’s Canton Home,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 16, 1991, 1C.

22.

John Affleck, “It’s Never Too Late to Be the First: Mary Regula’s Passion for History Sustained Her Dream for the First Ladies’ Library, Opening Today in Canton,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 8, 1998, 2B.

23.

The enabling legislation is in National Park Service First Ladies National Historic Site General Management Plan, app. A, p. 67.

NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

“Addenda to Abstract of Title: City of Canton, County of Stark, State of Ohio, Lot No. 56 except 110’ off east end,” February 1, 1979 to February 12, 1979 at 2:34 p.m., No. 10.

Ronald W. Lehner, “Appraisal of Saxton House, McKinley National Historic Site, 331 Market Avenue South, Canton, Stark County, Ohio” (National Park Service, Midwest Regional Office, May 1, 1990).

Carl S. Anthony, Ida McKinley: The Turn of the Century First Lady Through War, Assassination, and Secret Disability (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2013), 8–9.

“At the Bar: Major McKinley’s Talents Quickly Obtain Recognition,” Canton Repository, July 2, 1891, 1; “The Girl of His Choice,” Canton Repository, January 24, 1943, 3.

“A Distinguished Guest: A Serenade to Be Given This Evening to Hon. Hannibal Hamlin,” Canton Repository, September 24, 1884, 1; “Whist Club,” Canton Repository, April 23, 1892, 5; “Local Notes,” Canton Repository, October 7, 1894, 1; “Notable Reception: McKinley-BarberSaxton Entertainment Friday Evening,” Canton

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Harry Truman ATE HERE A Presidential Site in Frostburg, Maryland MATTHEW ALGEO

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you might call “well fixed.” Harry’s only income was an army pension of $112.561 a month, and he refused to “commercialize” the presidency by accepting lucrative business offers or extravagant speaking fees.2 Around 12:30 p.m. on that unusually warm Sunday afternoon in 1953, the Trumans pulled into Frostburg, a small coal-mining town on the eastern slope of Big Savage Mountain in far western Maryland. They parked just off Main Street. Harry walked around to open the door for Bess, as he always did. Together they walked into the Princess and took a seat in one of the booths against the wall.

The ex-president’s fondness for the Princess was not strictly culinary. The diner was owned by George Pappas,

whom he described as “an old Greek who is a damn good Democrat.”3 Truman was only too happy to support a loyal Democrat’s small business. Pappas had come to the United States from Greece in 1907 with $14 in his pocket. He opened the Princess in 1939. Originally it was a confectionery, but over the years he began serving soup and sandwiches, and by 1950 he had turned it into a full-service restaurant.

The Trumans ordered the Sunday supper special: roast chicken with stuffing, lima beans, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, rice pudding, and coffee—for 70¢.

At first they went unrecognized. But their waitress, Grace Felker, thought there was something familiar about the bespectacled gentleman and his

P R E V I O U S S P R E A D A N D A B O V E : B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

it was sunday, June 21, 1953—Father’s Day. Harry and Bess Truman were driving from Independence to Washington in their brand new Chrysler New Yorker.

It was their first trip back to the capital since Truman yielded the White House to Dwight D. Eisenhower five months before, and their first long drive since the trip home from the 1944 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where Truman was nominated for vice president.

As always, Harry was behind the wheel and Bess rode shotgun. They traveled alone. Former presidents would not receive Secret Service protection for another twelve years. The Trumans traveled cheaply, too. Former presidents did not receive pensions at the time, and the Trumans were not wealthy, nor what

matronly wife. When she took their order back to the kitchen, she told the cook, George Pappas Jr., the owner’s son, “That looks like Harry Truman out there.” “I looked out,” Pappas recalled years later, “and I said, ‘It sure does.’ And it was. It was old Harry.” George Jr. had served eighteen months as a mess sergeant in the South Pacific during World War II. He said it was an honor for him to make lunch for his former commander in chief. “He was a good old fellow,” he said of Truman. “Good president too.” Like many of his generation, George Jr. gave Truman credit for ending the war. “That was really a tough decision, for that man to drop that bomb on all them people.”4 While George Jr. prepared the Trumans’ meals, telephones all over Frostburg began ringing. At the time, the town had no direct-dial service, so all calls had to be routed through an operator. It did not take long for the word to get out. Howard Ward, the Frostburg correspondent for the Cumberland (Maryland) Evening Times, was at home changing out of his Sunday best when he got a call from a friend telling him that the former president and first lady were in town. Ward thought it was a prank.

But after he hung up, his curiosity got the best of him. He put his suit back on and headed for the Princess. “Townspeople started to drop in for a Coke,” Ward reported in the next day’s paper, “and one bystander estimated the restaurant did a bigger soft drink business in the time the Trumans were there than in any other similar period.”5 The Trumans did not have a quiet repast. Children badgered Harry for his autograph. The adults weren’t much better, constantly interrupting the

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TOP: AP PHOTO/ROBERT E . STRONGMAN • BOT TOM: A SSOC IATED PRESS

The distance from the Princess Restaurant on Main Street in Frostburg, Maryland (opposite), to the United States Capitol is precisely 150 miles. Harry Truman could have told you that. Truman, seen at right moves luggage after checking in to a motel in Decatur, Illinois, in June 1953, and at the wheel of his car with his wife Bess beside him, planned his road trips meticulously, carefully calculating the mileage between stops. When he was a senator, he stopped and ate at the Princess on the drive between his home in Independence, Missouri, and Washington, D.C. But it was the visit he made to the Princess after he left the White House that transformed the diner into a grassroots memorial to the thirty-third president.

An archetypical American diner, The Princess Restaurant serves a full menu in a casual atmosphere furnished with a combination of booths and a long sit-down counter. opposite

couple’s lunch to shake hands. “Through it all,” Ward reported, “they remained gracious and were not annoyed.”6 “We lunched at Frostburg, at the Princess Restaurant,” Truman later recounted.

“I had been there before, but in those days they didn’t make such a fuss over me. I was just a senator then.”7 George Pappas died in 1963. George Pappas Jr. took over the restaurant and ran it until 1981, when his own son, George W. Pappas, took over. In 2016, George W. turned the business over to his daughter, Lauren Pappas, who had recently graduated from West Virginia University with a degree in advertising.

Of all the small mom-and-pop businesses that the Trumans are known to have patronized on their road trip, the Princess Restaurant on Main Street in Frostburg is the only one that has survived, more or less intact, in the same family. “Granddad was a hard worker and a thinker,” George W. explained.

“In 1949, to attract the ‘church crowd,’ he decided to stop selling beer. Beer was a nuisance anyway. Business went up immediately.” George says his father, George Jr., was no less diligent. “They

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were both hard workers and they’d give you a good meal for a good price.”8 When the Trumans came to Frostburg in 1953, Main Street positively bustled with businesses, including Durst Furniture, Prichard’s Hardware, Maurice’s Department Store, Hohing’s Men’s and Boys’ Store, a G. C. Murphy’s five-and-dime, a Rexall, an Acme, and an A&P. Besides the Princess there were a dozen other places to get a meal, ranging from drugstore soda fountains to white tablecloth restaurants: Al’s, Bob’s, Boney’s, the Duchess, Finzel’s, Peck’s.

On Friday nights, coal miners from all over Allegany County would bring their families to Main Street for dinner and a movie, to do a little shopping, or just to hang out. It could get a little raucous sometimes. It was what they did for entertainment.

Today, all those businesses are gone, except for the Princess. What happened?

Lots of things. Highway 40 was rerouted around the town, siphoning traffic from Main Street. Then Interstate 68 was built, siphoning even more. A mall opened down the road in LaVale, followed by a Walmart and other big-box stores. white house history quarterly

A L L P H O T O S T H I S S P R E A D : B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

This framed photo of President and Mrs. Truman with Princess owner George Pappas was taken during their 1953 visit and hangs above the location of the booth where they ate lunch.

There were less obvious factors, too.

Technological advances made it easier to mine coal from the surface, a process that is cheaper than underground mining and requires fewer workers. Before Frostburg knew it, Friday nights on Main Street were a lot less boisterous.

But Frostburg is bouncing back.

Since 2015, twenty new businesses have opened in the town.9 Today, the Princess Restaurant still looks much as it did when Harry and Bess ate there in 1953. Along one wall is a soda fountain, with a long counter and fixed, round stools. On the opposite wall are a dozen booths, each with a small, coin-operated jukebox, one song for ten cents, three for a quarter (though Lauren Pappas confided to me that most

of the jukeboxes do not work anymore; apparently a good jukebox repairman is hard to find).

A plaque above the booth in which the Trumans sat commemorates their visit: MR. AND MRS. HARRY S. TRUMAN ATE DINNER IN THIS BOOTH FATHER’S DAY SUNDAY, JUNE 21, 1953

The booth is not original. It was replaced during a remodeling in the early 1990s. George W. Pappas kept the old one in his garage for several years, until his wife suggested that the space might be better utilized by a motor vehicle.

George called the local historical society to see if it was interested in this unique

piece of local history, but, alas, it did not have any room for the booth either. So, reluctantly, George put it out with the trash one day. 10 Lauren Pappas says Truman fans from far and wide have made the

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The Apple Pie Sunday is one of the popular staples on the Princess Restaurant’s menu. opposite

The Trumans at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., with their daughter Margaret during their 1953 road trip.

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summer of 1953 attests, Harry Truman was a man of the people, perhaps the last citizen-president, a failed haberdasher who became the leader of the free world.

In a way, it is fitting that his memorial is a booth in a diner in a small town on Main Street.

NOTES 1.

David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 928.

2.

Harry S. Truman, Mr. Citizen (New York: Geis Associates, 1960), 58.

3.

Quoted in George Kennedy, “Citizen Truman Sleeps Late, Omits Stroll,” Washington Evening Star, June 22, 1953, 7.

4.

George Pappas Jr., interview by author, October 4, 2007.

5.

“Truman Pays County Visit; Creates Stir,” Cumberland (Maryland) Evening Times, June 22, 1953, 7.

6.

Ibid.

7.

Quoted in Kennedy, “Citizen Truman Sleeps Late,” 7.

8.

George W. Pappas, interview by author, October 4, 2007.

9.

Jessica Palumbo, “Checking in with Frostburg,” posted June 1, 2017, Small Business Revolution (blog), online at www.deluxe.com/ small-business-revolution/blog.

10.

George W. Pappas, interview.

11.

Lauren Pappas, telephone interview by author, November 30, 2017.

12.

“Truman Takes Walk, Talks of Library,” Baltimore Sun, June 30, 1953, 2.

white house history quarterly

P R I N C E S S R E S TA U R A N T OPPOSITE: HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM.

pilgrimage to the Princess. “It’s funny that they still come in and want to see where the Truman booth is,” she says.

“You wouldn’t think this many years later there would still be such interest.”11 Politicians in search of a good photo op have been known to stop by, too. In December 2015, Maryland governor Larry Hogan made it a point to eat lunch in the Truman Booth when he visited Frostburg to serve as grand marshal for the town’s holiday parade.

While he was back in Washington that summer, Harry Truman took one of his famous morning “constitutionals,” a brisk walk around the city. He zipped past the great memorials to his predecessors: the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial. There are no grand memorials to Harry S. Truman in Washington (though there is a movement to add a statue of him to the Capitol’s famous Statuary Hall). And Harry would be okay with that. He always insisted he was not interested in a memorial to himself. “I’ll be cussed and discussed for the next generation anyway,” he liked to say.12 Besides, as the road trip he and Bess took in the

Washington Area Homes of the Twentieth-Century PRESIDENTS Before and After the White House

HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

ANTHONY S. PITCH

f or the many twentieth-century presidents who began their Washington careers with the government, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was not their only Washington, D.C., address. Some purchased houses, but many, like Senator Harry S. Truman, seen here making toast in his Connecticut Avenue apartment in 1942, lived in temporary quarters while maintaining their permanent residences out of state. Until 1974, even the vice president had to find a place to live while serving as second in command. Today Number One Observatory Circle serves as the vice president’s official residence, but for much of the twentiethcentury, it was not uncommon for the vice president to rent a modest house or an apartment or even stay in a hotel.

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homes on tree-lined streets that remain privately owned.

For such presidents as Jimmy Carter, the White House was the first and only Washington stop for the moving van. The homes of the others, from Theodore Roosevelt through George H. W. Bush are featured here.

white house history quarterly

AP IMAGES

on his first full day as vice president of the United States, Gerald Ford left his suburban home in Alexandria, Virginia, as his wife Betty waved goodbye. The following tour of surviving Washington, D.C., area residences of twentieth-century presidents before and after the White House captures their changing lifestyles as the century progressed, from the private stately homes that now serve as embassies, to the efficient postwar apartments, to the comfortable family

Theodore Roosevelt

WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASS OCIATION

1229 19TH STREET NW

theodore and edith roosevelt rented the red brick neo-Georgian house at 1229 19th Street NW and kept their family home in Sagamore Hill, New York, while the future president served as assistant secretary of the navy during William McKinley’s administration. They were joined by their daughter Ethel and two sons. Alice, his daughter by his first marriage, lived usually with her grandparents in Boston. Roosevelt became assistant secretary of the navy in 1896 and vice president in 1901. From this house he

moved to the White House in the fall of 1901, after the assassination of President William McKinley. The house is now the headquarters of a law firm.

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2215 WYOMING AVENUE NW

the only man to serve as president of the United States and chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, William Howard Taft spent the last decade of his life in this Georgian Revival home. As chief justice, Taft frequently walked the 3 miles to the Supreme Court, which was then inside the Capitol, and he occasionally also walked home. He was the plumpest man to serve in both pinnacles of public office. At his inauguration he weighed 332 pounds.1 The jovial man had a 54 inch waist and a 19 inch neck. He went on a

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diet, then lamented, “Things are in a sad state of affairs when a man can’t even call his gizzard his own.”2 Taft successfully crusaded for the U.S. Supreme Court to have a building on its own.3 He died in this house in 1930 and is buried beside his wife, Helen, in Arlington National Cemetery.4 A Japanese cherry tree was planted beside her grave 80 years after she placed the first one at the Tidal Basin.5 Taft’s imposing house is now the Embassy of Syria, although diplomatic relations were suspended in 2014.

white house history quarterly

B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

William Howard Taft

B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

Woodrow Wilson 2340 S STREET NW

le ss than one mile away, on S Street NW, is the house where Woodrow Wilson resided from the day he left office in 1921 until his death in 1924.6 His second wife, Edith, described the house, built in 1916, as “an unpretentious, comfortable, dignified house, fitted to the needs of a gentleman.”7 An elevator was installed for Wilson, who had suffered a paralyzing stroke during his tenure.8 Edith Wilson remained in the house for decades, until she died—on Wilson’s birthday, December 28, 1961.9 Upon her death

she transferred the house to the National Trust for Historic Presentation, together with an endowment for its maintenance.10 Today it is open to the public and furnished as it was when Woodrow Wilson lived there.

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2314 WYOMING AVENUE NW

alice roosevelt longworth, daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, joked that Warren G. Harding was not a bad man, “just a slob.”11 Wealthy socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean wrote that Harding chewed tobacco “and did not care if the whole world knew he wore suspenders.”12 Elected to the U.S. senate in 1914, Warren G. Harding occupied this neo-Georgian house until relocating to the White House in 1921. After becoming president he sold the house to his friend, Charles Cramer, chief counsel to

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the Veterans’ Bureau. When a scandal of misuse of funds pointed to the Veterans’ Bureau, Cramer resigned. He saw his wife off to New York, then shot himself dead in the bathroom. The police found a news item on his desk announcing the imminent probe of the Veterans’ Bureau for alleged malfeasance.13 The renovated house is now the Embassy of Monaco.14

white house history quarterly

B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

Warren G. Harding

B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

Calvin Coolidge The Willard Hotel 1401 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE NW

w h e n h e m o v e d to Washington, D.C., in 1921 from Vermont as Warren G. Harding’s vice president, Calvin Coolidge determined that residing at the Willard Hotel would be more frugal than purchasing a house in the city.

Following Harding’s sudden death in August 1923, the presidential flag few at the entrance to the hotel as Coolidge remained in residence until Mrs. Harding vacated the White House. Founded in 1846, the Willard Hotel remains a Washington landmark, known for accommodating six

sitting vice presidents including Millard Fillmore. Many presidents, beginning with Franklin Pierce have either attended functions or stayed at the hotel. In 2017, Wishbone and Drumstick, the two turkeys who received an annual Thanksgiving presidential pardon from President Donald Trump, spent the night here.

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2300 S STREET NW

l i v i n g n e a r t h e Wilsons for the eight years while he was secretary of commerce was the future president Herbert Hoover. He and his family occupied this sturdy neo-Federal home until he moved to the White House in 1929.15 Hoover’s dour looks hid a mischievous sense of humor. Once, while entertaining friends in this house, two U.S. senators also turned up during dinner. He had forgotten to mention the invitation to his wife Lou Hoover, who immediately told him to take the new arrivals into the library. She let her first

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guests know of the quandary and then set the table again for everyone. The dinner began anew, but the newcomers ate in ignorant bliss.16 The building is now the Embassy of Myanmar.

white house history quarterly

B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

Herbert Hoover

B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

Franklin D. Roosevelt 2131 R STREET NW

ar ou n d midnight o n June 2, 1919, a terrorist walked into R Street NW clutching a homemade bomb and leaflets calling for global revolution and class warfare. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt had just closed his front door at 2131 behind him. Across the street, at 2132, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had only then walked upstairs to his bedroom. The bomb exploded prematurely, blowing apart the terrorist. The front of Palmer’s house collapsed, destroying the seat where he had been reading.

Palmer survived. The blood and flesh of the terrorist fell on the Roosevelts’ doorstep. By the light of searchlights lawmen placed body parts on newspapers in the street.17 Palmer launched an investigation, under young J. Edgar Hoover, who would later head the Federal Bureau of Investigation.18 Roosevelt’s home, where he lived from 1916 to 1920, is now the home of the ambassador from Mali.

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Sedgwick Gardens 3726 CONNECTICUT AVENUE NW

h a rry tru man wa s elected to the U.S. Senate in 1934 but did not maintain a permanent home in Washington until he began his term as vice president in 1941. The Trumans loathed Washington and always rented only for a short time—at least twice on Connecticut Avenue while the Senate was in session. In December Truman wrote his wife, Bess, that he had rented a two-bedroom apartment on Connecticut Avenue for $130 a month. It belonged to the son of the editor and owner of the Atlanta Constitution and

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a delirious Truman told Bess, “I could have kissed them for letting me have it.”19 In a later letter he confided that “the toaster is all right but I don’t think the electric iron is any good.” Happily, he reported the rental came with “a new Hoover vacuum cleaner.”20

white house history quarterly

B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

Harry S. Truman

B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

Harry S. Truman Truman House 4701 CONNECTICUT AVENUE NW

o n april 1 2 , 1945, dramatic history unfolded while Vice President Harry Truman occupied a second apartment, number 209 in this other building overlooking Connecticut Avenue.21 He was in the Capitol, about to sip a whiskey, when House Speaker Sam Rayburn told him to return an urgent call from the White House. Press secretary Steve Early summoned the perplexed Truman immediately to the White House.22 There, after learning that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died, Truman phoned his wife, Bess, who

cried.23 He was sworn in as president in the Cabinet Room of the West Wing but before returning to the apartment he phoned a friend to cancel their poker game that night.24 The Trumans lived in this five-room apartment from late 1941 to January 1945 at a fixed monthly rent of $120.25 They stayed on for the first five days of his presidency before moving to Blair House and then home to the Executive Mansion across the street.26

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The Wyoming 2022 COLUMBIA ROAD NW

d w i g h t e i s e n h o w e r a n d his wife Mamie lived in a three-bedroom apartment in this Beaux-Arts building from 1927 until 1936.27 He studied at the Army War College,28 went to France to write a guidebook on the battlefields of Europe,29 then worked in the War Department next to the White House.30 When Ike left for the Philippines in 1935, Mamie stayed so their son John could finish eighth grade31 at the nearby John Quincy Adams School.32 John Eisenhower told the author that while still a boy he bathed while his father

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shaved, after which Ike would step into the same bath water. He said that one day after he filled the tub with ice cold water his father’s shriek must have startled the neighbors.33 When the stock market crashed in 1929 Ike stopped taking the nickel trolley and began walking the twelve blocks to work at the War Department beside the White House.34 Shortly after World War II ended Mamie complained to an aunt that John, then a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army, had only written her twice in three months. “I could smack him,” she joked.35

white house history quarterly

B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

Dwight D. Eisenhower

John F. Kennedy

DAN CHUNG

3307 N STREET NW

thre e days after the birth of their daughter, Caroline, on Thanksgiving eve 1957, the Kennedy family rented this three-story red brick Federal house in Georgetown.36 The president-elect was also living here when their son, John Jr., was born the day after Thanksgiving three years later.37 Kennedy practiced his inaugural speech in the ground-level library.38 Decades later the author went inside JFK’s private home, with its large living room facing the street and a garden in the back. Off limits were JFK’s guestroom on the

mezzanine floor and the master bedroom above. Among the distinguished visitors to this home were former President Harry Truman,39 and Ben Bradlee, then Washington bureau chief of Newsweek magazine, a neighbor and close friend of the Kennedys.40 Kennedy presented a plaque of thanks that journalists prepared for Charles Montgomery and his daughter, Helen, who gave them warm haven and food during frigid pre-inaugural weather at their house diagonally across the street.41 Today the house is privately owned.

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4921 THIRTIETH PLACE NW

i n 1 9 4 2 l a d y bird johnson wept when her husband, then a congressman, told her they could not afford the house she found at 4921 30th Place NW. She had pooled a family loan and small inheritance but Lyndon Johnson would not budge. The Texas couple had been staying in hotels when congress was in session and Mrs. Johnson wanted to settle in a home in Washington. One morning she assumed her husband had gone out to his office but he returned with a grin saying he had talked the seller down by $500 and

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they bought the house for $18,000.42 When the author went inside during a 2005 estate sale, the shower seemed cramped, far different from the high-velocity showerhead that Johnson installed in the White House twenty years later and Richard Nixon complained almost blew him away.

white house history quarterly

B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

Lyndon B. Johnson

Lyndon B. Johnson

LBJ LIBRARY

The Elms 4040 52ND STREET NW

when he became vice president in 1961 Lyndon Johnson bought this mansion furnished on 52nd Street NW from the legendary Perle Mesta, known as “The Hostess with the Mostest,” who was appointed by Harry Truman as ambassador to Luxembourg.43 Here the Johnsons lived on a greater scale then they had known before, extending their famous Texas hospitality generously. After John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson went first to the White House and then came home.44 Staffers reported that he and Lady Bird

watched television until 3:00 a.m., discussing future projects as Johnson moaned to a photograph of his late confidant, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, “Oh Mister Sam, I wish you were here now. How I need you.”45 Lady Bird began keeping a diary a few days after the assassination; the vast manuscript would eventually be published in part as A White House Diary.46 The Johnsons moved into the White House two weeks later.47 Today the Algerian government owns the property.

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TILDEN STREET NW

s e c u r i t y wa s l ax i n the 1950s when Vice President Richard Nixon lived in this house on an exposed and unfenced corner lot. He bought the house for $41,000 in 1951 after his election to the Senate and stayed for six years, into his vice presidency.48 The three-bedroom house became notorious during the election of 1952 after allegations surfaced that he had a secret slush fund. In his defense, Nixon addressed more than 60 million people on radio and television in what came to be known as the

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Checkers Speech. After denying all allegations, he said would not return a black and white cocker spaniel named Checkers, a family pet donated by a wellwisher.49 He won overwhelming approval, and the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won the 1952 election by a landslide.50

white house history quarterly

B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

Richard Nixon

B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

Richard Nixon FOREST LANE NW

at the b eg in ning of his second term as vice president Richard Nixon bought an eleven-room English Tudor home for $75,000 in Wesley Heights, a few miles from their previous home.51 Collections of miniature elephants in jade, ivory, bronze and other materials lined his bookshelves in the study. Visitors to the house included German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Israeli Prime Minister David BenGurion.52 In 1955 the Nixons were about to go to bed when the White House press secretary phoned to say President

Eisenhower had suffered a heart attack. “Oh my God!” Nixon gasped. Reporters and photographers besieged the house until the crisis eased the following month.53 Four years later Nixon cracked two ribs after slipping on ice outside.54 The family left Washington for California eight months after his defeat by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election.55

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Gerald R. Ford

w h e n p r e s i d e n t g e ra l d r. ford was a member of congress in the 1950s, he and his wife Betty and their children lived in a rented townhouse in Parkfairfax, in Viginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., where Richard Nixon had also lived at one time. The Fords planned and built a split level house in Alexandria’s nearby Clover neighborhood, to which they moved in 1955. When Ford became vice president in 1973, the Secret Service enclosed his garage and created a command-center wired for security

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and surveillance. All the Fords greatly loved this house and planned to return to it after his presidency, but were warned by the Executive Protection Service of the complications such a move would involve for security and their neighbor’s privacy. The Fords moved instead to Palm Springs, California, and eventually with sad reluctance sold the Alexandria house.

white house history quarterly

DAN CHUNG

CROWN VIEW DRIVE

George H. W. Bush

GEORGE BUSH PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY

ONE OBSERVATORY CIRCLE

w h i l e s e r v i n g a s CIA director in the 1970s, George H. W. Bush lived on Palisade Lane in Northwest Washington with his family. As Ronald Reagan’s vice president, he spent eight years living at the official residence for the vice-president, One Observatory Circle. Built in 1893, it was the home of the Observatory’s superintendent until 1923 when it became the stately residence of the chiefs of Naval Operations. Since 1974 it is has been reserved for the vice president, although Nelson Rockefeller,

the first to have the priviledge, used the house only for entertaining. In 1977 Walter Mondale moved in as the first vice presidential occupant. Less than three miles northwest of the White House, surrounded by acres of manicured grounds, the property is enclosed by security fences and sensors, but is partially visible from the road. The best position for a peek is from the gates on Massachusetts Avenue.

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NOTES C-Span TV filmed a tour based on of portions of this article in 1999, and has given permission for publication of this article.

1.

Hope Ridings Miller, Great Houses of Washington, D.C. (New York: Clarkson N. Potter,1969), 7.

2.

Phyllis Robbins. Robert A Taft: Boy and Man. (Cambridge, MA.: Dresser, Chapman & Grimes, 1963), 193.

35.

Author’s copy of Mamie Eisenhower’s letter to “Aunty,” October 21, 1945.

36.

Mary Barelli Gallagher. My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy. (New York: David McKay Co., 1969), 35.

37.

Washington Post, “Boy Is Born to the Kennedys,” November 25, 1960, I.

38.

Gallagher, My Life, 84.

39.

Ibid., 54.

40.

Benjamin C. Bradlee. Conversations With Kennedy. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 21.

41.

Gallagher, My Life, 53.

42.

Robert A. Caro. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent.

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 62, 70–71.

43.

Goode, Best Addresses, 289.

44.

Washington Post, “Johnson takes over Presidency,” November 23, 1963, I.

45.

Merle Miller. Lyndon, An Oral Biography. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s & Sons,1980), 324.

3.

Doris Kearns Goodwin. The Bully Pulpit. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 666.

4.

Ibid., 100.

5.

Washington Post, “Cherry Festival To Plant Tree For Founder,” April 10, 1992, CI.

6.

Diane Maddex. Historic Buildings of Washington, D.C. (Pittsburgh: Ober Park Associates, 1973), 171.

7.

Edith Bolling Wilson. My Memoir. (Indianapolis: The BobbsMerrill Co., 1938), 312.

8.

Ibid., 314.

9.

Margaret Truman, Editor. Where The Buck Stops: The Personal and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman. (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 353.

46.

Lady Bird Johnson. A White House Diary. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1970), Preface vii.

47.

Ibid., 14.

10.

Maddex. Historic Buildings.

48.

11.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Crowded Hours: Reminiscences.

(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,1933), 325.

Julie Nixon Eisenhower. Pat Nixon, The Untold Story. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 111.

49.

12.

Evalyn Walsh McLean. Father Struck It Rich. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1936), 217–8.

13.

New York Times, “Worried By Critics, Cramer Takes Life,” March, 15, 1923, 1.

Author’s copy of audiocassette recording from Nixon Project, National Archives Trust Fund, August 13, 1993. Printed version, New York Times, “Senator Nixon’s Broadcast Explaining Supplementary Expense Fund,” Sep. 24, 1952, 22.

50.

14.

Washington Post, “A Kalorama Embassy Worthy of A Prince,” December 19, 2006, C3.

Lester David. The Lonely Lady of San Clemente: The Story of Pat Nixon. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978), 97.

51.

Ibid. 100–01.

Eisenhower, Pat Nixon, The Untold Story, 170.

15.

The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet & the Presidency 1920–1933 (New York: The McMillian Co., 1952), 186.

52.

53.

David, The Lonely Lady, 99–100.

16.

Ibid., 187.

54.

17.

New York Times, “Palmer And Family Safe,” June 3, 1919, 1–2.

Stephen E. Ambrose. Nixon: The Education of a Politician 1913–1962. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 543.

18.

Richard Norton Smith. An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984) 93.

55.

New York Times, “Nixon, Wistful, Leaves Capital,” June 6, 1961, 15.

19.

Robert H. Ferrell, Editor. Dear Bess: The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman 1910–1959. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1983), 379.

20.

Ibid., 383.

21.

Plaque on main door of apartment 209 in 4701 Connecticut Avenue NW.

22.

Margaret Truman. Harry S. Truman. (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1972), 207-8.

23.

Ibid., 210.

24.

David McCullough. Truman. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 348.

25.

Ibid., 334.

26.

Plaque in lobby of 4701 Connecticut Avenue NW.

27.

James Goode. Best Addresses: A Century of Washington’s Distinguished Apartment Houses. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 86.

28.

Kenneth S. Davis, Soldier of Democracy: A Biography of Dwight Eisenhower. (New York: Doubleday & Co.,1952), 221.

29.

Merle Miller. Ike The Soldier: As They Knew Him. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1987), 233–4.

30.

Miller, Ike The Soldier, 248.

31.

Davis, Soldier of Democracy, 247.

32.

Miller, Ike The Soldier, 246.

33.

John Eisenhower conversation with the author, December 21, 1996.

34.

Miller, Ike The Soldier, 248.

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•• OBAMA HAWAII

Presidential Sites Across AMERICA MAIN E

VT • ARTHUR WILSON • S OTA COOLIDGE • N H • G.H.W. BUSH • PIERCE • PIERCE • PIERCE N EW YORK TAFT • COOLIDGE GRANT • • FILLMORE COOLIDGE • MA KENNEDY •• • W I SCO NS IN VAN BUREN • • ADAMS CLEVELAND • BUSH • G.H.W. • T. ROOSEVELT EISENHOWER • ADAMS • J.A . ADAMS OBAMA • E. ROOSEVELT • • FILLMORE • CT RI MICH IGAN FDR • • KENNEDY G.W. BUSH • • CLINTON T. ROOSEVELT • FORD • TRUMP WASHINGTON • • GRANT TRUMP • • CLEVELAND OWA • FDR WASHINGTON • • BUCHANAN • MCKINLEY • GRANT • CLINTON ADAMS • WILSON • • GRANT FIRST LADIES •• MCKINLEY • M. EISENHOWER • WASHINGTON HAYES REAGAN • OBAMA GARFIELD • •• • • GRANT PEN N SYLVAN IA • BUCHANAN • HOOVER • BUCHANAN • HARDING • • REAGAN NJ EISENHOWER HAYES • • LINCOLN • INDIANA WASHINGTON • • LINCOLN • WASHINGTON • LINCOLN • B. HARRISON OH IO WASHINGTON • • LINCOLN MD WASHINGTON • DE • WILSON • LINCOLN • B. HARRISON • L . HAYES DC • WASHINGTON(4) TAFT • CLEVELAND • • LINCOLN W. HARRISON • • WASHINGTON(3) B. HARRISON TRUMAN • • IL LINOIS • MONROE GRANT TRUMAN • • GRANT WEST WILSON • • JEFFERSON W. HARRISON • MADISON • • MONROE TYLER • M.T. LINCOLN VIRGIN IA VIRGIN IA ••• JEFFERSON • GRANT • LINCOLN • JEFFERSON • W. HARRISON •• LINCOLN MI SS O U R I • E.B. WILSON KENTUCKY TRUMAN • A . JOHNSON • LINCOLNA . JOHNSON • JACKSON • POLK • N ORT H CA ROLINA • POLK TENNESSEE A RKA NSA S • JACKSON SOUT H CAROLINA • CLINTON • CARTER • WILSON • WILSON • EISENHOWER Included are presidential sites, birthplaces, • CLINTON ALABAMA GEORGIA Included presidential birthplaces, and homes,are identified bysites, the name of the • FDR MISS ISS IPPI and homes, identified or by the name of the associated president first lady.

• CARTER associated president or first lady.

• COOLIDGE • •

MCKINLEY COOLIDGE

• COOLIDGE

KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS

KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS

• WILSON

FIRST LADIES refers toto The National FIRST LADIES refers The NationalFirst FirstLadies LadiesLibrary Librar y

FLOR IDA

A. ADAMS refers Abigail Adams A. ADAMS refers to to Abigail Adams J. ADAMS refers toto John Adams G.H.W. BUSH refers George H. W. Bush G.H.W. BUSH refers to George H.W. Bush G.W. BUSH refers to George W. Bush G.W. BUSH refers to George W. Bush

B. HARRISON refers to Benjamin Harrison

M. EISENHOWER refers to Marie Geneva “Mamie” Eisenhower

W. HARRISON refers to William Henry Harrison B. HARRISON refers to Benjamin Harrison

• TRUMP • HARDING

A. JOHNSON refers to Andrew Johnson W. HARRISON refers to William Henr y Harrison

C.T.L.JOHNSON refers to Claudia Taylor (Lady Bird) Johnson HAYES refers to Lucy Webb Hayes

LBJA.refers to Lyndon JOHNSON refersJohnson to Andrew Johnson

• KENNEDY • NIXON

C.T. JOHNSON refers Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson M.T. LINCOLN refers to to Mary ToddTaylor Lincoln LBJ refers to Lyndon JohnsonRoosevelt E. ROOSEVELT refers toB.Eleanor

M.T. LINCOLN refers to Mar y Todd Lincoln

FDR refers to Franklin D. Roosevelt

• TRUMAN

E. ROOSEVELT refers to Eleanor Roosevelt

T. ROOSEVELT refers to Theodore Roosevelt FDR refers to Franklin Delano Roosevelt

T. ROOSEVELT refers to Theodore Roosevelt E.B. WILSON refers to Edith Bolling Wilson

W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

LO U I S I ANA

REFLECTIONS

Presidential Sites SUMMIT

the white house historical association will convene the Presidential Sites Summit from August 27 to August 30, 2018, in Washington, D.C. This gathering of presidential birthplaces, childhood homes, libraries, museums, and places named for presidents will provide an opportunity for collaboration, shared information, and the discussion of common challenges.

The common connection that all presidents have is the White House. Forty-four of America’s forty-five presidents have called the White House home and office. Our first president, George Washington, selected the site and the young Irish architect James Hoban to design the iconic building. But it was John and Abigail Adams, the second first family of the United States, who first occupied the house in 1800.

During the four-day summit in Washington, the Association hopes to forge bonds of communication among these sites that will continue following the summit. Topics to be discussed include digitization, education, development, and other areas identified in a survey sent to every site we could identify. For the first time in the history of these gatherings, the Association will include descendants of former presidents, who at the invitation of First Lady Melania Trump will plant a tree on the South Lawn of the White House on Monday, August 27, to honor the memory of all former presidents and first ladies.

It is a privilege for the White House Historical Association to host this historic gathering in our nation’s capital, and we look forward to being an

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ongoing connector, communicator, and collaborator with these wonderful colleagues whose sites’ work and mission are compatible with our own. We hope this mutually supportive relationship strengthens and grows for years to come.

Presidential sites, whether large and wellfunded or small and volunteer based, are extraordinary outposts of presidential and civics education from coast to coast. The map on pages 76–77 includes public and private presidential sites we identified and contacted to be a part of the 2018 Presidential Sites Summit and whose work we seek to recognize in this publication as well as birthplaces and private homes of the presidents. Future issues of White House History Quarterly will feature one presidential site per issue as our way of honoring the great work being done through these sites from coast to coast.

white house history quarterly

OPPOSITE: GETTY IMAGES

STEWART D. M C LAURIN PRESIDENT, WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

The Lincoln Memorial and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (above) are just two of the many historic sites in the Nation’s Capital included in the 2018 Presidential Sites Summit. white house history quarterly

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WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

white house history quarterly features articles on the historic White House, especially relating to the building itself and life as lived there through the years. The views presented by the authors are theirs and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the White House Historical Association.

front cover For our front cover on this presidential sites issue we feature the most iconic presidential site, the White House. All presidents have lived there, except the first, George Washington, who supervised its design and construction. Except for the North Portico, built for Andrew Jackson 30 years after the house was constructed, this view of the President’s House has changed very little since the last stones were set in 1798. [bruce white / white house historical association]

the white house historical association was chartered on November 3, 1961, to enhance understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of the historic White House. Income from the sale of White House History Quarterly and all the Association’s books and guides is returned to the publications program and is used as well to acquire historical furnishings and memorabilia for the White House.

address inquiries to: White House Historical Association, P.O. Box 27624 Washington, D.C. 20038 books@whha.org © Copyright 2018 by the White House Historical Association. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrival system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the White House Historical Association.

issn 0748-8114