Lawnfield: Garfield's Front Porch and the First Presidential Library
Near Cleveland, Ohio
The house behind you is called Lawnfield, and it changed how Americans choose their presidents.
In eighteen seventy-six, Ohio congressman James A. Garfield and his wife Lucretia bought a run-down farm in Mentor and immediately expanded it from nine rooms to twenty, making room for their large family and their ambitions. Four years later, when Garfield won the Republican presidential nomination, he refused to chase his opponent around the country. Instead, he stayed home on this porch and let the country come to him.
The strategy was unprecedented. Reporters dubbed it the Front Porch Campaign. That summer and fall of eighteen eighty, an estimated seventeen thousand visitors made the journey to Mentor, by train, by wagon, on foot. Garfield would speak from the porch, answer questions, shake hands with delegations of veterans, farmers, and factory workers. Newspapers from New York to San Francisco filed dispatches from this lawn. He won the presidency without leaving northeast Ohio.
Garfield's time in the White House lasted only two hundred days. On July second, eighteen eighty-one, a disappointed office-seeker named Charles Guiteau shot him at a Washington railroad station. Garfield lingered for eighty days before dying on September nineteenth, more from the infections caused by his doctors' probing fingers than from the bullet itself. He was forty-nine years old.
His widow, Lucretia, outlived him by thirty-six years and spent much of that time preserving his legacy. In eighteen eighty-five she added a Memorial Library wing to the back of the house, a dedicated space to hold his papers and books. Historians recognize it as the first presidential library in the United States, built by a grieving spouse before there was any official framework for preserving a president's record.
The family donated Lawnfield to the Western Reserve Historical Society in nineteen thirty-six, and Congress formally designated it a National Historic Site in nineteen eighty. The National Park Service took over full management in two thousand eight. The house still contains much of its original furniture, the campaign office where telegrams arrived in eighteen eighty, and that Memorial Library wing, quiet proof that Lucretia Garfield understood what history owed her husband.
