Sat., August 12: Fascinating First Ladies

The 1783 Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution sorta didn’t. The complaints of the Native allies of the British against the new Americans were not addressed. Namely, the new Americans kept coming. So Native Americans kept fighting. In 1790-91 a confederacy1 The word simply means a loose organization of independent states, such as the Six Nations Confederacy in Upstate New York (Iroquois, Senecas, and others). Before the 1791 Constitution tied them closer together, the new United States were a confederacy, as was, obviously, the Confederacy of the Southern states in the Civil War. of nations beat the crap out of U.S. troops, twice. As a result, a Revolutionary hero, Maj. Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne2 So-called for bold attacks he led during the Revolution, some of them successful. , was put in charge. He drove troops toward today’s Toledo in August 1794, taking the wise precaution of halting short each day and building fortifications for the night. I drove around Perrysburg to meet him.

This involved a sweep to the northwest on US 23 prolonged by road construction that had closed the exit I wanted, sending us several miles farther to the next. Eventually I got to Fallen Timbers Battlefield Park, the only significant historical site on this trip that was a city park (as opposed to county, state, or national). That’s a shame. The visitor center appeared permanently closed, given that no hours were listed and it was dark inside on a Saturday. The well-groomed circle trail had no sign indicating which way to go. I walked it among high weeds and young trees in protective sleeves, all part of a laudable attempt to reintroduce native plants.

Unfortunately, the interpretive signage was the worst of any battlefield I have visited—ever, except for those with none. Most of the signs were nearly irrelevant to the action that took place at a given spot, some covering events miles away without making that clear. Nor is the information on the Internet of great use. Much as I distrust Wikimedia generally, having found many instances where it is wrong, it had by far the most detailed description. I gave it a skim.

According mostly to that, the warriors chose this site because a severe storm had blown down trees for nearly a mile (hence the “fallen timbers” name), creating natural defenses. As best I can piece together, most of the combat occurred southwest of the modern park. Roughly 1,500 warriors had been in the area, but some split. They thought rain that day would prevent any fighting, reasonable given that gunpowder does not work if it gets wet. An unknown number of those remaining formed a line south of the fallen trees and scared off the Kentucky militia soldiers in front of Wayne’s regular troops. Supported by artillery firing grapeshot3 Basically a bag or tin can full of bullets or slightly larger lead balls, turning the cannon into a big shotgun. , the regulars pushed the warriors back and through the trees. Suffice to say the Natives put up a stiff resistance but were driven off, despite a final stand in a ravine.

An Odawa chief known as Turkey Foot stood on a rock closer to the nearby Maumee River to rally the troops, and was promptly shot dead; the rock has since been moved to a battle monument. Normally I would question the provenance, but its plaque indicates this one received offerings of the kinds we saw out West, so I will trust the oral tradition. Once pressed out of the ravine, the warriors lost all cover and retreated to a British outpost on land the Brits were hanging onto, as they did with Mackinac Island.

The battle broke the Native confederacy in what the U.S. called the Northwest Territories, and mostly ended armed resistance to the white invasion there. Fallen Timbers was bloody, by standards of the day: Anywhere from 19-40 warriors were killed, depending on whom you asked, plus six white guys fighting on their side—some Canadian militia were involved, dressed in native clothing. Wayne had 33 killed and around 100 wounded.4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fallen_Timbers.

I find it disgraceful that a battle of such importance in the history to both sides is so poorly treated. I don’t blame the city, which has limited funds to distribute across its parks. This should be at least a state historic site, if not a national park. The best thing for me about the place was the bevy of younger attractive females using the trail as a running track, at whom I threw a few discreet glances, trying not to creep them out.

It was heating up already, so I switched into shorts in the car. After a quick stop at the monument, affording the pic of the rock above, I took US 24 northeast into Perrysburg. Construction continued the several miles the warriors retreated toward the British fort, and when MapQuest said I should turn right, I couldn’t, there or the next several opportunities. MQ had been premature: The road I was able to take led directly to my destination.

The earthworks of Fort Miamis still exist, because the British were not messing around. Built the year of the battle, a massive case of trespassing given that this was U.S. territory by treaty, it was on a bluff over the Maumee River that made it unapproachable on one side. The other three were protected by a trench 25 feet deep, with abatis (sharpened sticks) pointing into it from the fort. To get to the front door required passing through a circular section like I’ve never seen before, which would have greatly slowed progress and made anyone stuck in the round a sitting duck. That’s it in the photo; a guard tower used to be in the middle of the entry point, the slight depression left of center. The day of the battle there were 130 Redcoats and 14 cannons inside the fort, plus the warriors I mentioned who left Fallen Timbers before the fight.

Not inside by evening were the warriors who had stayed for the battle. The British major in command, William Campbell, was not interested in starting a new war with the United States. So he kept the gates closed against them, and they moved on. Shortly after, new neighbors appeared, in the form of Wayne’s army. He camped nearby for three days. Wayne did not have enough cannon-power and provisions to besiege the fort, and was equally uninterested in a new war, one presumes. In a triumph of understatement, he wrote the British commander, “’I have no hesitation on my part to say, that I know of no War Existing in Great Britain and America.”5 From a history panel at the site.

With equal equanimity, Campbell responded, “that being placed here in Command of a British post, and acting in a Military Capacity only, I cannot enter into any discussion either on the right, or the impropriety, of my occupying my present position…“

In a remarkable show of courage (or madness), Wayne made his point—we own this land, dude—by taking a slow ride of inspection along the exterior of the fort.

Despite the best efforts of these commanders, the two countries got back to warring in 1812, as you know. The British reoccupied this spot as a base for attacking Fort Miegs upriver, successfully. An historical marker here tells the sobering story of British Pvt. Patrick Russel. During that campaign, American prisoners of war were brought here, apparently outside the remains of the fort. Native Americans began following their usual practices, that is, torturing and killing their captives. Private Russel tried to intervene, and was shot dead for his efforts.

After passing through the pleasant village of Waterville, we crossed the river and made our way to reconstructed Fort Miegs. It seemed unusually active, and once inside the visitor center I learned why: An American Revolution event was going on. This may seem odd given my AmRev background, but my instincts reacted badly. I didn’t want to pay the extra admission fee or deal with the crowds. The volunteers at the desk encouraged me to go in, but I just said, “I want to avoid that,” and did. I don’t regret it.

I let MQ lead me back to US 23 and southwest for maybe an hour, through flat farmlands and a few small settlements to Fremont. This was the hometown of Rutherford B. Hayes.

If you are asking, “Who?,” don’t feel bad. He is one of the most forgotten of U.S. presidents. Let’s try to rectify that a bit. I have mentioned that Reconstruction of the former Confederacy was brought to a premature end after Pres. Grant left office. Hayes was the guy who killed it, despite being a member of “the Party of Lincoln,” the Republicans, like Grant.

If you think the contested presidential elections of George Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000 or Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump 2020 were aberrations, think again. Hayes lost the popular vote in 1876, like Bush in 2000, and the issue came down to which states Hayes or his Democratic opponent had won, again like 2000. Technically, when you think you are voting for U.S. president, under the Constitution you are actually voting for “electors” who in turn vote for the president. States get to choose whether the winner of the popular vote gets all of its electors, or the electors are divvied up in the same percentages as the vote. Whoever wins the most electors becomes president. I’ll throw in here that there is no legal requirement for the electors to vote as instructed. If you’re an American and think you live in a democracy, think again. Our form of government is technically a “republic,” given this indirect way of voting in our leaders, and the fact we elect people to Congress instead of directly voting on every bill (like the Ancient Athenians did).

Anyway, Hayes’s people challenged the result in three states, including Florida, the centerpiece of the 2000 election fight. A commission was set up by Congress to decide which candidates’ electors from those states were valid. Wisely, it contained seven members from each party, and a Supreme Court justice as the tiebreaker. The justice was supposed to be elected by the court, but everyone expected him to be one from Illinois who was not a member of either party.

In a classic dirty political trick, the Illinois legislature, controlled by Republicans, promptly elected that justice U.S. Senator!6 In the original Constitution, state legislators chose the two U.S. senators from each state. A later amendment changed that to the direct votes we have today. The justices then picked a Republican from their number. Despite his reputation as being above partisanship, he gave into pressure from his party and awarded Florida’s electoral votes to Hayes, against considerable evidence the Democrat had won. Hayes became president.

To garner support from Democrats in the South, his handlers had promised that U.S. troops stationed to enforce Reconstruction in two of the Southern states in contention would be removed. A month after he took office, that promise was kept, and Reconstruction effectively ended. That said, Hayes did try to get Congress to pass laws protecting blacks’ rights, unsuccessfully. He also pushed through legislation allowing women lawyers to practice at the Supreme Court.

Hayes tried to initiate something that has long been the accepted practice in the federal government. Most government jobs were given out by politicians to their supporters, regardless of whether those cronies had any skills relevant to the work. However incompetent you claim federal workers today to be—a charge I reject, having worked for the government at Los Alamos and had vital assistance from Foreign Service personnel—you cannot imagine how bad it was in those days. Hayes wanted to impose the approach Chinese rulers had used for centuries: nonpartisan civil service exams you had to pass to get the job. But legislators liked the power their job-granting gave them and refused. Hayes’ approach was adopted many years later.

I stepped into the relatively tiny Hayes Presidential Library and Museum, and chatted with the young lady behind the cash machine as I paid for a tour of his home. Apparently I mentioned being a history writer, because she said she was a writer. I asked what she wrote, and she said mostly “fan fiction,” meaning stories built off TV shows or video games. I encouraged her to keep at it, and headed off to start the exhibits. As at Ike’s museum, I had to interrupt that to get to the front porch in time for the tour.

On the way to the house I was entertained by a couple of squirrels exercising on a tree, one of them doing pull-ups on a plaque. (Not really: Just a lucky shot.)

Among the small clutch of people awaiting the tour guide was a family group: a haggard-looking mom and her mom, and a couple of boys. One of them was autistic, constantly moving and making sounds, but grandmother sweetly kept him in control through constant contact. His brother was verbal, but also twitchy. I enjoyed hanging with fellow outliers from the norm.

The brick house, named Spiegel Grove, was built for Hayes’ uncle during the Civil War. He intended to share it with Hayes and his family and eventually sold it to them with an unusual condition: They must keep his bedroom exactly as it was, because he intended to retire there. Hayes said in his diary the wrap-around veranda was the best part. “‘But I would enlarge it,’” he added. “‘I want a verandah with a house attached!’”7 Quoted in: https://www.rbhayes.org/estate/hayes-home/. Enlarge he did, the house anyway. Many original furnishings remain, but the home was owned by four subsequent Hayes generations and thus has changed further. The stove was not original, but they managed to find its sibling, just one serial number off.

The entire massive house, now 31 rooms, is somehow showcase-beautiful and yet comfortable. I can’t improve on this quote from the site’s website, about one of Hayes’ changes: “The most spectacular improvement was a four-story walnut and butternut staircase leading to a rooftop lantern offering a 360-degree view of Spiegel Grove.”

I had a funny moment in one of the rooms, when I asked about an apparently off-kilter doorway. Our young woman tour guide said she had never noticed it. After a moment’s staring, she then pointed out that what I thought was part of the decorative border was actually a painting rail. We saw one of these at the former executive mansion in Helena, from which paintings were hung using hooks and wires. For some reason the rail here was placed lower on that side of the door, causing the optical illusion of the doorway being skewed!

Let’s talk about Lucy Webb Hayes. Lucy and I have some things in common, starting with our dads having died when we were young. She probably didn’t recall hers, since she was two.8 Given that they apparently lived in Lexington, Kent., and he was a prominent doctor, it’s likely he knew the father of another future first lady: Mary Todd Lincoln, whose childhood home we visited. Her single mom raised three children, like mine. And our moms both pushed education. Like my sisters, Lucy graduated college, but she did it in 1850, a rare event in those times due to social bias. In fact, she was the first First Lady to do so. She married Rutherford, a lawyer at the time, two years later at age 20, and raised five surviving children. They named one son “Webb”; there’s ‘a web of Webbs’ in this family, I joked in my head. Rutherford volunteered to help put down the Confederate insurrection and served throughout the Civil War, rising to general. Lucy visited him in the field, and came to nurse him when wounded. I don’t know how many times she did that, but he was a bullet magnet, wounded five times. This gives him the dubious record for “president most wounded in combat.”

After a brief stint in Congress, Hayes became governor of Ohio. Lucy was one of the first “first ladies” to do the kinds of social-good projects routine among them today. She was the driving force behind the founding of an orphanage, by raising private funds and then strong-arming state legislators into buying it.

When the Hayes got to the White House, Lucy had fancy shoes to fill, those of our friend from St. Louis, Julia Grant. She refused, much to the relief of America. Recall that Julia was a spendthrift on the public dime. Lucy was equally wealthy by inheritance, but lived quietly. (She reminds me of Warren Buffet, the über-wealthy founder of investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, who famously continued to live in the same modest middle-class home and drive an old unfancy car.) “Lemonade Lucy” supported her husband’s political decision not to serve alcohol at the White House. A “Temperance Movement,” in which females were prominent, was building across the nation and would lead to alcohol becoming illegal 40 years later.9 “Prohibition” by constitutional amendment, repealed after a decade. She apparently wasn’t a prig about it, though. She didn’t object to others bringing booze in, and never formally joined the movement.

The annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House you see in the news every year? Lucy started it!

Lucy's 1858 foot-powered sewing machine, which she took to the war front and the White House She was complicated. She held traditional views of her role as mother and wife. Seeing her sewing machine took me back to childhood, playing with my grandmother’s newer but still foot-powered model. But Lucy wasn’t one to conform to all of society’s expectations. “‘Instead of being considered the slave of man, she is considered his equal in all things, and his superior in some,’” she wrote of womankind.10 http://archive.firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=20. In a lot of ways, she reminds me of Pres. Jimmy Carter’s wife Rosalynn a century later, in terms of her role as a political advisor, taking active positions on everything from abolition pre-war to foreign relations after it. In 1878, on a presidential visit to Philadelphia, Lucy may have been the first First Lady to schedule visits separate from her husband’s. Not only was she very generous to groups and needy individuals, she would get personally involved. She supported both Native- and African-American rights—relative to the prevailing attitudes of the day, anyway—and hosted Frederick Douglass at the White House. However, she was very wrong in thinking Hayes’ removal of troops from the South would help blacks. Toward the end of her life, she also became more conservative in her religious beliefs, which in turn led her to take some racist positions that ran counter to earlier actions.

When the tour guide said their son Webb, who later had an army career, was at the Boxer Rebellion, I questioned why. This was an uprising by Chinese trying to kick out British colonists around 1900—which America played no part in. I guessed, and confirmed later in the museum, the U.S. sent in forces including him to protect and evacuate American citizens.

Back to the house. The tour group saw the Hayes’ four-poster bed, but I was far more impressed by the fancy 19th-Century bathroom:

On the third floor, I think, a plain wicker chair grabbed my attention, so plain I won’t bother showing the pic. But I geeked out, because Pres. Ulysses Grant sat in it at Hayes’ inauguration.

I was amused by a sitting room with heavy drapes that later generations put up. The library/museum next door was built in 1916, the first presidential library, while descendants still lived in the house. Visitors kept wandering over and looking in, hence the drapes.

Back to the museum I went, where my architect-grandfather’s grandson was impressed by the clever combined ramp-and-steps at the entrance. Inside were a couple of surprising artifacts. For one, the wooden sign from Rutherford’s father’s tavern still exists. Absolutely fascinating was the Civil War version of a Swiss Army knife, hound-shaped, with a knife, nail file, and scissors. The coat Hayes was wearing when he got his worst wound of the war is behind glass, the bullet’s damage visible on the back of the sleeve at the elbow. (Ironically, he may have been lucky. That injury at the Battle of South Mountain in Maryland prevented his being at the Battle of Antietam four days later, the bloodiest single day of the war.) I got too close to his presidential carriage—which he had to pay for himself—and got yelled at by an automated voice warning.

“Rutherford Hayes was not a large man,” an exhibit pointed out, at 5’8”. Though it deemed his clothing style “simple,” it included another perspective: “Detractors said that he dressed shabbily.” Rutherford could accessorize, though. He had a collection of almost 100 walking sticks, which I appreciated, having a cane myself. Lucy’s wedding dress was chic.

In the last full year of his presidency, 1880, the Hayes did something I appreciate: They took a cross-country trip! Train travel was sufficiently advanced by that time that the pair made it here from the White House in one day. Making stops along their way west, they took nine days to reach San Francisco via Chicago, Omaha, Salt Lake City and points between. Other than eight days in San Fran, they were on the move nearly daily for three weeks in California, Oregon, and Washington Territory (including Seattle) before heading south. They roughly blazed the route I took moving from Pullman to Rochester 108 summers later: Through Southern California and the Desert Southwest, including four days in New Mexico Territory, and then angling up through Missouri back to Fremont. They arrived back in D.C. after nine weeks. I was desperate to get a good picture of the U.S. railroad map of the time marked up with the route, sister to the spider-webbed road map on my wall, but the glass defied me.

Hayes decided one term was enough, and retired to Fremont. After dedicating themselves to causes that again reminded me of Rosalynn Carter and her husband, Lucy died after eight years here, and Rutherford four years later. Back outside, with rain threatening, I hurried to the back corner of the grounds to pay my respects:

I got back to the Sage barely ahead of the real raindrops. My visit was surprisingly pleasant; both the house and the museum have more to offer than I’ve relayed, because I wanted you to know more about Lucy.

What seemed like an easy run west to pick up US 53 got convoluted, and when I tried to cut back to a major road I found myself dead-ended in a park. I gave into the siren call of MapQuest. It got me to the highway and south through flat farm country to Upper Sandusky, where I picked up four-lane US 23. MQ took me past a sign pointing toward my next stop, and the atlas makes clear the app took me the long way through Marion to the home of another forgotten president, Warren G. Harding.

Born at the end of the Civil War to a midwife mother and farmer-turned-doctor father near Marion, Harding eventually graduated college and found a job as a newspaper reporter. A couple years later he and some partners bought the struggling Marion Star, and he and his wife Florence turned it into a success. They worked his way from state senator to U.S. senator just as World War I was breaking out in 1914. Six years later, his Republican Party struggled to come up with a candidate for president. In those days nominees weren’t elected by popular vote. Delegates elected at state-level party conventions went to the national convention and voted on the nominee. In 1920, no one was compelling enough to get enough votes, and Harding was chosen as the “he’ll do” candidate.

Presidentia The Harding Home isn't really crooked, though many in his administration were. The wide-angle lens on my camera crunches angles this close! l candidates didn’t travel around campaigning much in those days; you may recall that Grant didn’t campaign, period. Harding did, but mostly went no farther than his front porch. Thousands of people came to hear him speak here. It worked, because he won by a number unimaginable these days, winning 60% of voters—including women, for the first time—and 75% of those electoral votes we talked about with Hayes. A lot of what he did as a Republican president sounds pretty familiar: cutting taxes for rich people, putting tariffs in place, and trying to limit immigration. (In those days, “dark-skinned” Italians and Greeks and Eastern Europeans were “the problem.”) He supported creating a federal budget process and the General Accounting Office, which to this day audits the books of federal agencies.

The U.S. also hosted a conference to stop the arms race, though I don’t recall how much he was involved. Today there’s a race among various countries to have the best computer system attack and defense. When I was growing up, the race was to have the most atomic bombs and missiles. In the early 1920s, a few years after WWI, the concern was massive navy ships. The conference resulted in a treaty to limit them.

But Harding is probably best known, like Grant (as president), for several of the buddies to whom he gave high-level jobs ripping off the public. Harding’s name is linked in the history books to the Teapot Dome Scandal. His Secretary of the Interior, aided by other corrupt politicos, took bribes from oil companies to rent federal lands that were supposed to be protected as U.S. Navy oil reserves. (The name comes from a rock near one of the oilfields that, prior to later erosion, looked like a teapot.) Unlike Grant, Harding played at least an indirect role, accepting a lot of oil company campaign funds and building an extremely pro-business cabinet.

In his third year he followed Rutherford Hayes’ example and took a similar railroad trip west. It didn’t work out quite as well. When Harding got to San Francisco, he got a gift that pulled me up short. My family was into antiquing, the one activity we could enjoy together, and I was with my Rochester brother-in-law when he picked up a mahjong set at an antique shop. For the uninitiated… you’re lucky. It’s disturbingly addictive . The game was invented in the 1880s in China, where play can go days. It uses a set of at least 136 “tiles,” most in different suits and numbered, plus some special types. The goal is to build sets and straights like in card games to build the highest score. We often stayed up playing it with their then-young kids, the aforementioned Marty and Melissa, into the wee hours on weekends. Harding received this stunning set from the “Native Sons of the Golden State.” He likely never used it.

After a few days of illness, he died in bed one early evening. I’m not suggesting the game was at fault, though it can be aggravating. Several good-quality websites say the cause was probably a heart attack, but that wasn’t the diagnosis at the time. The museum has a copy of the death certificate. It says, “Cerebral apoplexy”—meaning a stroke.

Yet again, I managed to arrive just in time to catch a tour, this one at 3 o’clock. A half-dozen people were seated in wicker chairs on the round part of the porch. “Sorry I’m late,” I said, and took a wicker seat, the one to the right of the gap in the picture. The porch, as you can see, is covered in tile, the only tile-covered porch I recall encountering. Cracks were visible. The older woman tour guide pointed these out, as they seemed at odds with the story of restoration she was telling, a careful attempt using photographs, construction receipts, and written descriptions to return the house to its 1920 appearance. Turns out, the cracks were there in 1920! The guess is that the tile was put down too soon after the concrete underneath, causing separation as it settled.

Only at this point did I learn photo-taking was not allowed inside, so I’m going to fail you a bit here. I hadn’t brought a notebook with me, and it didn’t cross my mind to take notes on the phone, probably because I’m a slow thumb-typist. We’ll have to muddle through on the few notes I took that evening.

Upon my standing at the base of the staircase inside as she introduced us to the house, I was in historic footsteps: That’s where Warren married Florence Kling. Like my mother, Florence wanted to be a concert pianist and trained after high school, at a conservatory in Cincinnati. (Mother did so at Salem College in Winston-Salem.) Her father, a progressive thinker for his day, supported the move, saying it would allow her to “‘earn her own living in case she were ever thrown upon her own resources,’” by teaching. This turned out to be a good call.

Florence eloped when she was 19—maybe. No marriage license backs this up. More likely it became a “common law” marriage. To this day in some states, if you live like you are married long enough, and do marriage-like things such as opening a joint bank account, you are treated under the law as married. Regardless, her partner left her two years later, and two years after that she sought and was granted a divorce.

The reason for the de facto elopement arrived six months after that event, in the form of a son. He was raised by Florence’s father, but she began teaching piano lessons to support herself. Eventually she met the publisher of the local newspaper, Warren, and they got married right where I was standing, in the house they had built. A couple years later, her life took an intense turn as Warren suffered some sort of mental difficulty, after which he was in and out of a hospital in Michigan. In the course of this, the business manager of the paper quit. Florence stepped in and brought the paper financial success, greatly expanding subscription sales through a series of savvy moves, and hired a first for Ohio: a female reporter! She only gave up the gig after Warren became lieutenant governor.

Like Lucy Hayes and Rosalynn Carter, Florence saw herself as part of a political team with Warren. (She draws parallels with another First Lady who fits that description, Hillary Clinton, in that both stood by their husbands despite wandering penises.) During the convention that nominated Warren for president, Florence “seeking support from undeclared delegates was news in and of itself, the New York Times further reporting she was the first candidate's wife to speak with the press.”11 http://archive.firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=30. In fact, Florence is the prototype for activist first ladies. She shared her political views openly, and would not wear a wedding ring because she saw it as a sign of ownership. People who griped in the 1970s about Rosalynn sitting in on meetings of the Cabinet might be shocked to know Florence Harding had a critical role in the formation of her husband’s Cabinet fifty years earlier. As first lady she invited divorced women to White House socials—horrors!—as well as various female advocacy groups, African-American high school girls, and a women’s tennis match. She was at Warren’s side when he died. She eventually returned here, and died at a hospital in town at 64.

I should have taken better notes that evening, because drafting this five months later, I have few memories from inside the house. The radiators were exposed like those in my mother’s 1927 home, but here the pipes carrying hot water to and from them were exposed as well. Childhood nostalgia ensued. I noticed in one room that the Hardings had pictures of Civil War generals Grant, whose home we visited; Phil Sheridan, later a major figure in the Indian Wars whose namesake town we passed through in Wyoming; and William T. Sherman, who passed through my town of Durham en route to accepting the surrender of the largest Confederate army.

The older-female guide did a fine job, but began turning to me when asked historical questions she didn’t know the answer to. Perhaps it was because I happened to know the answers to a couple she humbly admitted not having. To make her feel better, I pointed out that I was a history writer. I also identified an item she pointed out in the kitchen, a small wire basket with a handle, as a “soap reuser,” though the Web tells me the proper name is soap “saver.” Soap being far more expensive to buy or make in those days, the last slivers of it would go in the basket for use in washing things by swirling it in the water.

The standout item of the house for me was a plaster cast of a dismembered hand, resembling the disembodied “Thing” from the Addams Family. Large and long-fingered, I should have guessed it was cast from life from Abraham Lincoln. I wanted to pick I it up and get some sense of what it would have been like to shake his hand.

Once again a tourist’s hat at a historical house prompted notice, this one saying, “New Bern, N.C.” I asked as we left. It turned out the wearer had visited the town, which is on my American Revolution website, four months earlier.

I went around front to get the picture of the porch above. The guide came out as I arrived, and we chatted briefly while standing where Warren gave all those campaign speeches, at the top of the porch steps. Finding out where I was from, she said she and her husband passed through N.C. heading to and from Florida every year for the winter. She asked about Biltmore House, the over-the-top mansion built by a Northern industrialist at Asheville. They had a reservation to visit overnight one time, but a hurricane chased them away.12 I presume she meant 2022’s Ian, which landed in S.C. as a Category 5 and drove straight up to Charlotte, causing major flooding and power losses around Asheville as well.

Back at the museum, I was a bit surprised by the “magazine camera” from 1898 used for the newspaper. We think of technology as moving fast these days, but this was a pretty impressive improvement from the glass plates and tripods still in use twenty years earlier. Warren’s 1921 inaugural suit, on the other hand, was not much different from the one Hayes wore 50 years earlier. I especially enjoyed seeing a player piano. This again raised a childhood memory. A man in my neighborhood invited myself and a friend in when we were preteens, and showed off his player piano, driven by punch-hole paper rolls to play itself. In today’s environment I would be wary of inviting two kids into my house without parental permission. How many great childhood memories are being prevented by parental paranoia, without making kids any safer?13 The vast majority of crimes against children, then and now, are perpetuated by people close to them.

At the front desk I asked how to get to the Hardings’ graves and was handed a very confusing map. Even though it showed a road heading almost directly south from the historic site, red arrows directed a long detour through three stop lights on the highway into town, and then around curves south and west onto a long stretch back to that direct route—on which I had to go south a short distance to the graves.

I made a swing through the charming downtown first, then begrudgingly took the long way ’round, nearly missing the southward curve. It turns out the would-be direct route is one way north, for reasons I cannot understand, as it is wide enough to admit two-way traffic. Nor do I understand skipping two potential southward turns, except they must go through neighborhoods that don’t want the rabid hordes of Warren Harding zealots clogging up their residential streets.

The gravesite is… what is the phrase I’m seeking… absurdly grandiose for a man best remembered for the corruption in his short administration. The graves themselves are marble biers backed by a high, semicircular, colonnaded memorial. I paid my respects nonetheless, after chatting with two women from the house tour who’d beaten me there and were looking over the history panel in front. “Fancy meeting you here,” I greeted them. I had wondered if they were a couple; given their ages near mine, this might have yielded some interesting stories of lesbianism in less-forgiving times. Alas, they were just friends, down from Cleveland on a weekend trip. We chatted about our tomorrow plans, and I went back to the Sage to book my evening’s hotel.

There was one more must-see sight on the list before I could arrive there. Despite never living anywhere near Columbus, I had been to town twice without seeing Ohio’s capitol building. The first was near the end of the 1990 Loop Trip. The friend I drove to Iowa on the way to my Pullman life was working at a summer outdoor drama in Eastern Ohio. I picked up Interstate 70 through Columbus, unsure in those pre-GPS days what time I would get to Chillicothe. Having to catch him before his evening call14 “Call time,” when he had to report to the amphitheatre to get ready for the performance. , I glanced longingly in the direction of the capitol and drove on. I made it.

The second time, neighbors I grew up with paid me to drive their 1973 Volkswagen Beetle to a Columbus suburb from Raleigh in the 2010s. They were giving up their beloved Bug to a grandchild, and were driving up for another’s bar mitzvah, so they could drive me back. I didn’t get there in time to visit the capitol before giving up my means of doing so.

Now I picked up US 23 again, and following MQ’s directions made my way to the edge of town, onto a bypass, and then down Interstate 71 into the core. Like the other government districts in midsummer, it was deserted. Like the other capitols after 5 p.m., it was closed. So all I could pull off was a walk around the unusually shaped building. Life tally as of this trip: 44 state capitols visited.

There was a street fair going on with some excellent funk music playing, but I was tiring out and still faced an hour’s drive on I-70 East. At the end I tucked into a forgettable but acceptable two-story motel in the highway crossroads of Cambridge, and indulged in an Impossible Whopper, too many fries, and an over-sized milkshake from the Burger King across the street.

Poorly scribbled, nearly readable notes. Bed.