A Lovely Presidential House Museum for an Unlovable President

The restoration of James Buchanan’s Wheatland keeps it feeling like a home while teaching American history.

T wo weeks ago I visited Wheatland, the stately home of James Buchanan (1791–1868), our 15th president. It’s in lovely, historic, immensely livable Lancaster in Pennsylvania. Buchanan isn’t much in the news, and hasn’t been since he left the country in shambles in 1861. He was once considered our worst president, a talking point but not one to swell his mother’s breast with pride and joy. The worst, he wasn’t. That would be Andrew Johnson, and then there’s Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover. The cream hasn’t exactly risen to the top since, say, the man from Hope, or was it Hot Springs?

Was Buchanan gay? He’s the likely suspect whenever gay rags are desperate for topics and dive into presidential sodomy. Who knows, and who cares? Safe to say, gay or nay, Buchanan had a no good, very bad, almighty hellacious time in the White House.

What to do with his house? I’ve just finished a ten-day swing from Lancaster in Amish Pennsylvania to Toledo, home to a great art museum. Presidential homes make for great history museums. I’ve written about Jackson’s Hermitage, near Nashville, FDR’s Hyde Park estate, and Coolidge’s historic site in Plymouth, near my home in Vermont. Failure that he was, I’m giving Buchanan a moment in the sun. Wheatland’s a gem. It’s owned and managed as part of LancasterHistory, once the county’s historical society. It’s a great organization with a first-rate building and a scholarly program.

Wheatland, a brick Federal-style manse, was built in 1828 on what was once a farm growing wheat — hence the name — as Lancaster developed into a small but prosperous city. It’s one of America’s earliest inland cities of consequence, with roads linking western Pennsylvania to Philadelphia. Buchanan wasn’t born there but started what became a sophisticated, expansive legal career in the city.

At 22, he was in the state legislature, and at 28 Lancaster’s congressman. He started as a Federalist. In 1824 he supported Andrew Jackson, and, as the two main American political parties coalesced, he aligned with the Democrats. From 1832 to 1856 he rose through the ranks as Jackson’s minister to Russia, Pennsylvania’s U.S. senator, secretary of state during the transformative Polk presidency, and U.S. minister to Britain under Franklin Pierce, who was, like Buchanan, an epic failure, but from incompetence and alcoholism, not bad judgment. On that score, Buchanan takes the cake.

Buchanan bought Wheatland in 1848. The house is two and a half stories, with a center wing flanked by two wings receding enough to give the place a mansion feel. The hallway is T-shaped, with the entrance hall running 42 by 8 feet front to back, and a second hall, 34 by 8 feet, bisecting it. It’s impressive. On the first floor are a parlor, sitting room, two dining rooms, one for formal dinners and the other for family breakfast and lunch, the kitchen, and Buchanan’s law office. The second floor is for family bedrooms.

After Buchanan left the keys to the White House to Abe Lincoln in 1861, he moved to Wheatland full time. He died there in 1868, leaving the house to his niece, Harriet Lane, who was his official hostess while he was president. The house went out of the family in 1884. The death of a subsequent owner in 1934 put Wheatland on the market again and, possibly, at risk of demolition as a developer had his eye on it. Lancaster’s Junior League formed a fundraising foundation to buy the house as a presidential shrine, and buy it the foundation did. Wheatland was officially up and running in 1936.

This was by no means the norm. Mount Vernon, the Hermitage, and Monticello were already house museums, but most other presidential homes faced the whims of the marketplace and buyers who, picking between heritage and their own taste and comfort, opted to make the place suit their own needs. On this trip, I went to Canton in Ohio, hoping to see the home from which William McKinley ran his front-porch campaign in 1896. No es posible. The house was demolished in the mid ’30s.

Buchanan didn’t decorate his house, Harriet did — not in provincial, bourgeois Victorian taste but a cut above, if only because she ran Buchanan’s London home while he was the minister. She had advanced taste. Buchanan’s possessions started exiting Wheatland as soon as he died. Harriet was there for summer vacations only. Furniture passed to extended family. The foundation that established Wheatland as a historic site made restoring the look of the interior a top priority, and that’s still the case today. Much of what we now see is the look of Wheatland in 1861, when Harriet redecorated what would be Buchanan’s last home.

A mantelpiece in a decorative fireplace is lovely, blue-and-white Italian marble. Bit by bit, Wheatland’s new custodians tracked down and acquired key pieces from subsequent generations. While he was secretary of state, Buchanan had purchased a French dinner service from France’s ambassador to the U.S. That returned, as well as Rococo Revival furniture now in the parlor and sitting room. Buchanan’s desk is back. His four-poster bed returned in 2019. The Rococo Revival–style carpeting is superb.

Infrastructure-wise, the house is in good shape. Things happen on a project-by-project basis. One next big step should be wallpapering the entrance hall, a grand space but now with white walls it wouldn’t have had in Buchanan’s time.

Here and there are objects similar to things Buchanan probably owned, like a seated commode or the very intriguing hat bath. When I heard the term, I thought, “How fastidious, but how do you bathe a hat, and why is the thing on the floor?” I’m given to literal meanings. A hat bath is a low, multigallon tub shaped like a hat. Think of it as a bird bath. People didn’t immerse themselves in water but washed body parts in sequence, with clean, hot water replacing sudsy water to achieve what isn’t my idea of clean.

The volunteer tour guides are very good. Like every public organization that relies on volunteers, whether a house museum or a small town library, Covid demolished the volunteer base. The people who run Wheatland are gradually rebuilding theirs.

The grounds are lovely. What was once, in Buchanan’s time, a 22-acre gentleman’s farm is now five shaded acres, mostly lawn and wild grass. Even on a hot day, it feels cool and breezy. There’s a privy and a smokehouse from Buchanan’s era. Wheatland’s next to the modern LancasterHistory building, but the two exist in harmony. The house, though on a busy road, is in a neighborhood of big, beautifully maintained homes, most from the 1910s and ’20s.

Wheatland’s front yard is spacious. Though Lancaster’s impressive and historic city center is a little more than a mile away, Wheatland still feels like the country estate Buchanan knew. Good historic preservation isn’t just about the building and its interiors. We like seeing a total ambiance, which, here, is effectively evoked. That’s smart stewardship.

Lancaster in the ’60s, the well-done exhibition at LancasterHistory’s main building, looks at the city and county in the 1660s, 1760s, 1860s, and 1960s. The section on the 1860s treats the Civil War, of course, but also Buchanan, Pennsylvania’s only president. Once secession and war happened, Buchanan was among the country’s most reviled men, a preview of Neville Chamberlain. Buchanan didn’t so much as appease the South but actively sympathized with it.

From early in his political career in Washington, Buchanan’s closest allies were Southerners. He didn’t exactly support slavery but hoped to save the Union by protecting it. In 1856, southern states elected Buchanan. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision came days after his 1857 inauguration. It seems Buchanan knew about it in advance and may have endorsed it sub rosa. He tried his hardest and stealthiest to make Kansas a slave state. Sometimes he seemed to bunt, and sometimes grudges from a long political career got the best of him. He despised Stephen Douglas, worked to undermine him in his 1858 Senate race against Lincoln, and seemed indifferent to the collapse of Democratic unity in the 1860 campaign.

In the months after Lincoln’s win, Buchanan shilly-shallied, to the extreme annoyance of all. By March 4, 1861, the Deep South states and Texas had seceded. “History will vindicate my memory,” he wrote in his memoirs. As LancasterHistory observes with pith, “so far, it has not.” A stern but fair verdict.

By 1861, Buchanan had been in political life for nearly 50 years. A long, distinguished résumé he certainly had. He was succeeded by Lincoln, who’d served only a single term in Congress.

I think Wheatland is well done. It’s old-fashioned, with interpretation confined to binders describing the furniture and decorative arts on display in various rooms. That’s fine. Plastering graphics everywhere would smother its biggest virtue — it looks like someone’s house.

The Lancaster in the ’60s exhibition isn’t on view forever. LancasterHistory rotates its big shows every few years. A deep dive into Buchanan’s presidency would be a good thing, especially in these perilous times when the country’s desperately short of good leaders.

Museums, Moms, and Muskets

Last week, I wrote my monthly piece about news in the art and museum worlds. I didn’t have space for the Museum of the American Revolution’s choice to stick to its muskets in hosting Moms for Liberty for an event during the group’s four-day Philadelphia conference. I’ve written about the museum before and like it a lot. Philadelphia’s a short 80 miles east of Lancaster. Buchanan was born while George Washington was president.

I’d never heard of Moms for Liberty. I looked at its website. It’s a new group “dedicated to unifying, educating, and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” It’s run by mothers, you know, the kind of mothers who are also women. The organization arose from school-mask mandates during Covid, useless school lockouts forced by teachers’ unions, and, I suppose, transmania, not to be confused with Tasmania, where, in the good old days, evil doers of all stripes landed on a one-way cruise.

Mothers, liberty, and parental rights put the moms’ group on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate map. I know something about the SPLC. It’s a racket run by race pimps. If it maintained an accurate hate map, the SPLC itself would get a space as big as Canada.

The Museum of the American Revolution needed to cancel the Moms for Liberty event, cried the SPLC. What’s come to be a predictable chorus sang, “Hallelujah, motherly speech equals violence.” Forty staffers at the museum claimed mothers boosting liberty and parental empowerment made them feel unsafe. The Organization of American Historians demanded the museum rescind its reception invite. It just opposed the Supreme Court’s decision to axe race-based college admissions. The director of the American Historical Association and the Alphabet People insisted the museum cancel.

The museum wouldn’t budge. “We seek to share diverse and inclusive stories about our nation’s history with the broadest possible audience,” the director said. Moms for Liberty had — and enjoyed — their event. I hear from my spies that on the appointed day the museum’s staff sported conspicuously cleaner fingernails as well as gleaming shoes, fresh haircuts, and polite, welcoming demeanors. Even the most petulant among them saw a legion of concerned mothers and backed off. As the only son of an Italian mother, I know a force of nature when I see one.

The director, Scott Stephenson, is a brave, honorable man. Leaders of art and history nonprofits need to stand their ground against petty tyrants as well as raise money and keep scholarly standards high.

I hear there’s a chapter called Serial Moms for Liberty. No white shoes, Trots, after Labor Day or else, and, by the way, get a better attitude. As George Washington said, “there is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet an enemy.”