Spiegel Grove: The Hayes Estate

Spiegel Grove in Fremont, Ohio was the home of Rutherford B. Hayes, the nineteenth President of the United States, whose uncle named the estate after the German word for mirror, for the pools of water that collected on the grounds after rain. Hayes inherited the property from his uncle, expanded the house in eighteen eighty and again in eighteen eighty-nine, and added a sweeping walnut staircase that climbed four stories to a rooftop lantern.

He and his wife Lucy both died here, in the house they loved, Lucy in eighteen eighty-nine and Hayes in eighteen ninety-three. After his death the estate was given to the state of Ohio, and the library that opened here in nineteen sixteen became one of the first presidential libraries in the United States, decades before the concept was formalized. Today it holds Hayes's twelve thousand books, his papers, and a museum on Gilded Age politics.