Lawnfield: Garfield's Front-Porch Campaign

Just east of Cleveland, the suburb of Mentor, Ohio, holds a quiet Victorian farmhouse that was the site of a political innovation. In eighteen eighty, James Garfield ran for president from his home here, which he called Lawnfield, conducting what became known as the first successful front-porch campaign in American history. Rather than travel the country stumping, Garfield received delegations of voters who came by train to his farm. An estimated five thousand people made the trip to hear him speak from the porch.

Garfield won. He served only two hundred days before being shot by an assassin in July of eighteen eighty-one and dying in September. Lawnfield is now the James A. Garfield National Historic Site, and it holds the first presidential library ever established in the United States.