On June 11, National Park Service Ranger Allison Powell talked to the Club from the James A. Garfield National Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio. Powell showed sixty slides while discussing the Garfield family home in Mentor as well as James Garfield’s life and presidency.
NE Ohio’s only U. S. President, James Garfield was born in a log cabin in 1831 to a poor pioneer family in Moreland Hills. His father died when he was an infant and his childhood was wracked by financial and familial hardship. But he applied himself in a Geauga school as a boy and earned a higher education at Williams College in Massachusetts. Returning to Ohio, he became an educator and a lawyer then entered Ohio politics.
He raised a volunteer regiment at the beginning of the Civil War, became the youngest Union brigadier general at the time and was successful in several battles. President Lincoln persuaded him to leave the Army and lend to the Republican cause in the U.S. Congress. He served there for 17 years representing Northeast Ohio.
Powell showed historic images of the farmhouse Garfield bought in 1876 for his time away from Congress and how he expanded the home from 9 to 20 rooms to suit his family. In 1880, Garfield attended the Republican National Convention urging the presidential nomination of Ohioan John Sherman but in the fragmented session was nominated himself on the 36th ballot.
As was the tradition of the time, newspaper reporters and voters traveled to the nominee’s home to learn his views. A nearby railroad delivered Black army veterans and other groups to the Mentor home, Powell said.
Garfield was president less than a year, felled by an assassin inside Washington’s old railroad station, located where the National Gallery of Art is today. Garfield’s casket lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda, then in Cleveland’s Public Square. It rests today in the Garfield Monument, which took four years to build in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland.
“The home in Mentor was grander than nearby Mentor farm homes,” Powell said, “but not so grand as industrialists were beginning to build in Cleveland or the summer homes they were beginning to put up in Lake County. Garfield’s wife Lucretia had good taste for interior design. After the assassination, she constructed in the back of the Mentor house what is considered the first Presidential Memorial Library, which was meant to hold her husband’s papers.”
By the 1930s, the home was in some disrepair and troublesome to the Garfield children, so they donated it to the Western Reserve Historical Society. The WRHS operated it and continues to do so, thought ownership of the house and grounds was transferred to the National Park Service, which undertook a thorough renovation.
Powell noted a number of Garfield sites in Washington, D.C. First is the exterior statue in front of the west side of the U.S. Capitol. Another full-standing statue is in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall. There are also a portrait and a bust within the Senate wing, and a portrait in the section of the National Portrait Gallery devoted to the U.S. Presidents. Plaques about Garfield and the assassination can be found across Madison Drive south of the National Gallery of Art.
Two recent books have renewed interest in President Garfield. They are President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear and Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard. Powell said that Netflix is working on a TV series based on the Millard book to be released in about a year and a half. She also noted approaching anniversaries: the 150th of Garfield’s election in 2030 and of the assassination in 2031.
Thanks to Member Naomi Romanchok for organizing this program.
Allison Powell can take questions about Garfield and the home in Mentor via email Allison_Powell@nps.gov.
Persons interested in seeing the slides Powell showed on June 11 can view them by clicking here.
For more information about the James A. Garfield National Historic Site, visit the official website.