Lawnfield: Where the Presidency Was Won and the First Library Was Born

The farmhouse on Mentor Avenue in the Lake County town of Mentor, Ohio, does not look like a place that changed American politics. But in the summer of eighteen eighty, James A. Garfield conducted the first successful front porch campaign in United States history from this porch, and the model he invented has echoed through American elections ever since.

Garfield bought the property in eighteen seventy-six as a modest farm. He expanded it over the years and was still renovating when he won a surprise Republican nomination for the presidency. Rather than traveling the country and making speeches, a practice then considered undignified, Garfield stayed home. Over five months, more than seventeen thousand supporters arrived by train, carriage, and on foot to hear their candidate speak from his own front steps. Cleveland newspapers dubbed the farm Lawnfield, and the name stuck.

Garfield won the election narrowly, defeating Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock. He was inaugurated on March fourth, eighteen eighty-one. One hundred days later, on July second, a deranged office-seeker named Charles Guiteau shot him in the back at a Washington train station. Garfield lingered for seventy-nine days before dying on September nineteenth, eighteen eighty-one.

The assassination had lasting consequences. It galvanized public demand for civil service reform, and in eighteen eighty-three Congress passed the Pendleton Act, replacing the spoils system with a merit-based federal workforce.

Lawnfield has one more distinction. In eighteen eighty-five, Garfield's widow Lucretia added a purpose-built room to the house to preserve her husband's books and papers. It is widely recognized as the first presidential library in American history.