McKinley Memorial: A President Comes Home

Canton, Ohio is where William McKinley made his name and where he came to rest. He had practiced law here, launched his political career here, and conducted his famous front-porch presidential campaign from his home on Market Street, where trains brought delegations from across the country to hear him speak. Winning the presidency in eighteen ninety-six and again in nineteen hundred, McKinley presided over the end of the depression of the eighteen nineties and the nation's emergence as a Pacific power after the Spanish-American War.

On September sixth, nineteen oh one, Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley twice in the stomach at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley appeared to be recovering, lingered for more than a week, and died on September fourteenth. Theodore Roosevelt, at forty-two the youngest man ever to assume the presidency, was summoned from a hiking trip in the Adirondacks.

McKinley's body was returned to Canton by train. The nation mourned with a depth of feeling that surprised observers who had regarded him as a competent but uninspiring president. Suddenly he seemed to embody a more peaceful, prosperous America that the new century's violence had interrupted.

The McKinley National Memorial was designed by architect Harold Van Buren Magonigle and constructed between nineteen oh five and nineteen oh seven. Nine states contributed materials: Ohio supplied the concrete and brick, Massachusetts sent the exterior granite, Tennessee provided the marble walls and pedestal. The circular domed structure rises ninety-six feet above a broad staircase of one hundred eight steps on Canton's Monument Hill.

President Theodore Roosevelt himself dedicated the memorial on September thirtieth, nineteen oh seven, the same year McKinley's widow Ida died and was buried with him inside the tomb. The McKinley Presidential Library and Museum stands adjacent, and the two buildings together tell the story of the Ohio lawyer who put America on the world stage.