Along the Way: James A. Garfield family home in Mentor well worth visiting

A beautiful early edition of an American presidential library is within easy driving distance for those of us in Portage County and currently admission is free.

Lawnfield, the James A. Garfield National Historic Site, is the 29-room mansion of the family of James A. Garfield, America’s 20th president. It is approximately one hour’s drive north, located on Mentor Avenue in Mentor.

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Garfield was elected president in 1880, but was fatally wounded on July 2, 1881 by a deranged and disappointed office seeker. Lingering until Sept. 19 under the care of an incompetent physician, Garfield was only 49 when he died. His time in office so brief, Garfield is not well known to today’s Americans. A visit to Lawnfield gives one the opportunity to become better acquainted with a man whom historians say was one of the best prepared of anyone who ever assumed the presidency.

The scholarly Garfield had graduated from Williams College, had served both as a teacher and the president of the Western Reserve Electric Institute (now Hiram College), became a heroic general fighting for the Union in the Civil War, and also had served in Congress for 17 years before his election to the presidency. As a young man, he spoke memorably at a courthouse rally in Ravenna on the need to abolish slavery during the campaign that elected Lincoln in 1860. He had earlier campaigned for state office speaking in Franklin Township Hall in Kent.

Wanting Father’s Day to be special, Janet suggested we spend the afternoon at Lawnfield. Neither of us had ever visited it. Garfield had moved there from Hiram because the Ohio legislature had gerrymandered his congressional district in a way that eliminated Hiram. It was a simple farm house on 150 acres when he bought it in 1876. Garfield expanded the home from nine to 20 rooms to accommodate his wife, Lucretia, their five surviving children, plus Garfield’s mother, Eliza. He kept Lawnfield a working farm where he taught his children farming and he successfully campaigned for the presidency from its front porch.

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Garfield took the oath of office in March, was shot in July, and died in September. After his death, Lucretia became the wealthy beneficiary of a trust fund created by public subscription. She came home and expanded Lawnfield into a 29-room, three-story mansion. She employed the services of prominent Cleveland architects and she meticulously decorated her expanded home, which eventually came under the ownership of the National Park Service.

The National Park Service, since the 1990s, has invested millions of dollars into Lawnfield and turned the property into a handsome campus of buildings on an eight-acre site. It offers one of the most accurate portrayals of the life of the post-Civil War period in Ohio with 80 percent of the furnishings donated by the Garfield family. The National Park Service provides knowledgeable tour guides.

All of the rooms are interesting, but the second-floor Memorial Library is a showplace, a paneled room of fully stocked book shelves and White Oak beams squaring off a coffered ceiling. A vaulted fireproof office that once housed Garfield’s papers is in a corner of the Library. The originals are preserved in the Congressional Library of Congress.

The mansion reflects the good taste of Lucretia, a well-educated and determined woman, although less outgoing than her husband. Visitors learn the Garfield marriage was not an easy one at first, but it produced seven children, five living on into adulthood. Nearly 120 offspring consisting of grandchildren, great grandchildren and great, great grandchildren, are alive today.

Lucretia Garfield lived until 1918. She was versed in the science and engineering of her time. She had the mansion retrofitted for natural gas and indoor plumbing taking advantage of underground sources on her property. Before Garfield was assassinated, Lucretia established the goal of improving the White House, capitalizing on its history, much the same as another widowed First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, set as her goal in the early 1960s before her husband’s assassination.

From the Civil War’s end through 1920, Ohio produced six presidents, more than any other state during the period. Lucretia shared her husband’s progressive views. In 1904, 23 years after her husband’s death, she endorsed the presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt. She later supported Woodrow Wilson when her eldest son, Harry Augustus Garfield, president of Williams College in Massachusetts, served in the Wilson Administration during World War I.

Northeast Ohio can take pride in the Garfield presidential home. Lawnfield is well worth a visit.

David E. Dix is a former publisher of the Record-Courier.

This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: James A. Garfield family home in Mentor well worth visiting