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Please join us on June 11 from 5PM to 6PM, for a talk and Q&A session with Allison Powell, Park Ranger at the James A. Garfield National Historic Site in Mentor.
Northeast Ohio’s only U.S. President, James A. Garfield rode a wave of good feeling and high hope when he was elected in 1880. The last U. S. President to have been born in a log cabin (a replica is open to the public in Moreland Hills), raised fatherless and in poverty, young Garfield found work as a mule driver along canals, studied at the Geauga Seminary then graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Williams College. Back in Cleveland he studied law and entered Ohio politics. A staunch Union and anti-slavery man, he joined the Army and soon was a successful general against the Confederacy. He served 8 terms in the U.S. Congress and bought his house in Mentor in 1876. From this home he ran a “front porch” campaign in 1880 that won him the presidential election.
Garfield entered the presidency keen on civil service reform, civil rights for Blacks, and a more encompassing system of education.
Garfield was shot in the back by a deranged man only four months into his presidential term in Washington’s railway station (then located where the National Gallery of Art is today). Chester Arthur became president.
Garfield’s home in Mentor has been designated a National Historic Site and is considered the nation’s best preserved presidential home of the Victorian era. Of “gothic revival” style, it is fully furnished in the décor mainly arranged by Garfield’s wife Lucretia, whom he had met in the Geauga school.
Lucretia remained in the home until her death in 1918. During those years she started in the house the first Presidential Library, a tradition extending to the present.
Allison Powell is a Park Ranger at the Garfield NHS in Mentor. She will have visuals that will take us into the home, explain the house, and discuss the life of the nation’s 20th president.
Garfield is buried in a mausoleum in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland. Here in Washington, the Garfield Monument stands in the roundabout at the southwest corner of the U.S. Capitol, where Garfield spent 20 years.
Two recent acclaimed books address Garfield’s life and times: President Garfield: From Radical to Reformer by Washington, D.C., writer C. W. Goodyear; and Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard.
You can register for this National Park Service program here.
See below for a list of Garfield books and websites.
Persons interested in this Club presentation may be interested in visiting these resources in advance:
Books
President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard
The Last Lincoln Republican: The Presidential Election of 1880 by Benjamin T. Arrington
Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield by Kenneth D. Ackerman
Garfield: A Biography by Allan Peskin
Lucretia : A Volume in the Presidential Wives Series by John Shaw
Crete and James: Personal Letters of Lucretia and James Garfield edited by John Shaw
The Road to Respectability: James A. Garfield and His World, 1844-1852 by Hendrik Booraem V
Websites & Videos