Grant Cottage: A Poignant, Dramatic Tribute and a History Museum That Works

There, the president and general who salvaged the Union barely beat death to finish his memoirs.

A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga. Afterward, I drove a few miles north to Mount McGregor and a tiny house museum called Grant Cottage. There, at Grant Cottage, in the summer of 1885, Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885), the general who won the Civil War and former president, dying of cancer and destitute via a Ponzi scheme, valiantly finished his autobiography. It wasn’t an ego trip, though Grant did discover he loved to write and was good at it. He was desperate for the fortune that the book would make and desperate to leave this life with his wife, Julia, financially secure.

The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, published in two volumes in 1885 and 1886, is still the best presidential autobiography, though it stops with the war’s end in 1865. It was the bestselling autobiography in 19th-century America. It’s Grant’s coming-of-age story and war memoirs. The books, still a great read, are spartan, precise, and just, pristine in each respect, never strident, with optimism and melancholy in equipoise. He knows the rhythm of the English language and how to deploy it, by instinct.

Grant Cottage is owned by New York’s Park, Recreation, and Historic Preservation Department. The Friends of the Ulysses S. Grant Cottage, a nonprofit, helps run it. It’s very little changed from the arrival of Grant, his family, and small crew of caregivers on June 16, 1885, through his death on July 23, his laying out in the parlor, and a family-focused funeral service on August 4. The clock on the fireplace mantle in the room where Grant died still reads 8:08, stopped by Grant’s son, Fred, at the moment of his death.

A friend asked me whether Grant Cottage was a “cottage” like the seaside manses in Newport, R.I. No, Grant Cottage is a twelve-tiny-room house in a vernacular American style with a fussy Queen Anne porch. Duncan McGregor, a local who had made a small fortune in construction materials, bought most of the forested, hilltop land in the late 1860s, at the start of Saratoga’s boom as a resort. He built the house as a small hotel. “If you build it, they will come,” he hoped.

Over the next years, investor developers, most from New York City, got a narrow-gauge railway connecting the site to Saratoga, and in 1882, a few hundred yards from the cottage, opened the luxury Balmoral Hotel. “No Dew, No Malaria, No Mosquitoes,” its marketeers promised city slickers, with cool mountain air and nice views included. The Balmoral had 150 rooms, electricity, indoor plumbing, no WiFi but, in its day, advanced. Still, Grant Cottage was, and is, modest.

Great things happen in the most unassuming, incongruous places. The road leading to the compact, effective visitor center passes through miles of farmland and the tiny, antique Wilton town center. Up the mountain we go. It’s actually only a thousand feet above the valley. On the fringes of the Grant historic site are empty, dilapidated buildings that were once a New York State–owned TB sanitarium, a rest home for veterans with shell shock after World War II, an annex for the Rome State School for learning disabled children, and, from the 1970s to 2014, a minimum- and medium-security prison.

The visitor center has a very good shop, balanced between books on Grant and his era and quality souvenirs. Grant Cottage is a short drive up the road, on top of Mt. McGregor. Parking is by the house. It’s forested, so the only views are to the prison watch tower — a touch of Cold War Berlin — and the prison baseball field — a touch of bizarro.

Tour guides take groups of visitors through the house. My group was a foursome, one a waterspout of anecdote. “I learned about this place when I was in jail,” a 70-something tourist said. I patted my backside by instinct, feeling for my wallet. “DUI . . . I wanted to go here, but the place was about to close.”

Ex-cons say the darndest things. As the tour unfolded, he shared his tonsil-cancer diagnosis and his taste in china, similar to Mrs. Grant’s. His ex-wife was “a selfish bitch,” unlike Mrs. Grant, who nursed her husband to his end. “It’s real nice here,” he said to me afterward. I make friends everywhere. “No dew, no malaria, no mosquitoes,” I added. No “fact-checking,” either. Lucky ABC’s crack hack anchors weren’t there. I was being eaten alive.

Around the same time of Grant’s diagnosis with terminal tongue and throat cancer in 1884 was a swindle of Gilded Age audacity and sweep. Grant, his son, Buck, and Ferdinand Ward, called the Young Napoleon of Wall Street, had formed an investment firm in 1881, after Grant and his wife had moved to an elegant townhouse on East 66th Street in Manhattan purchased for them by rich businessmen.

Grant had no understanding of money. He must have known that he was Ward’s front, signed whatever Ward put in front of him without reading it, and, by 1884, believed he’d become a rich man himself. How naïve could he have been? In early 1885, he learned to his chagrin that Ward was the Young Madoff of Wall Street. Grant was penniless.

He’d already been approached by Century Magazine’s publisher and, later, by Samuel Clemens, known as Mark Twain, to write his memoirs. He chose to go with a deal presented to him by Clemens. Thus his memoirs were born.

In mid-June 1885, Grant and his entourage traveled by train from New York first to Saratoga and then on another train to Mount McGregor. On the way to Saratoga, the train passed West Point, from which he’d graduated in 1843, ranked 21st in a class of 39. From a good Mexican War, he sank and rose. He had failed as a business owner, failed as a farmer, and grown overly fond of the hard stuff. Then he led the Union Army to triumph, became the president, traveled the world, and was fêted by queens and sultans. By 1885, he was in a final-act race between him and his memoirs and the Grim Reaper, between memories of the past and eternity.

A well-done visitor-center video hits all the right notes. Why was Grant writing his memoirs? Out of love for his family and as a final duty. Why was he at Mt. McGregor? He needed fresh, cool air and a country setting for his intense inner resolve to be fully mobilized. On E. 66th Street in Manhattan, he lived in the spotlight and under the microscope. His financial and health woes were headline news. That he was depicted with reverence and sympathy rather than ridicule wasn’t helpful. Ad hoc parades, children’s serenades, celebrity visitors, and a relentless flow of ministers were among the distractions there. Reporters camped on the sidewalk waiting for him to die. New York, to Grant, signified Ward, his own naïveté, his current pickle, and all his past pickles.

And the cottage was free. Joseph Drexel, the Philadelphia-born millionaire and New York philanthropist, owned Mount McGregor, the Balmoral, and the cottage. After Grant accepted his offer to stay as long as he wanted, Drexel did a speedy overhaul of the house, adding among other improvements the now-famous porch on which Grant wrote, day in, day out.

There’s an immense amount of written interpretation on wall panels. It’s too much, and I would ditch most of it. A brief biographical overview is enough. Why did Grant’s memoirs mesmerize? So tough a cookie as Gertrude Stein wept a bucket as she read the second volume. Finally, Grant’s final month was a profile in courage, grit, and focus in the context of debility and searing pain. What sustained him? He was fearless, relentless, a fast study, a clear, precise communicator, and human Teflon when it came to setbacks. That’s how he finished his book. That’s how, with his perfect partner, Lincoln, he saved the nation.

To casual Grant-o-philes, which everyone ought to be since he’s a great man, Grant Cottage is really Grant’s Porch. The photograph of Grant writing his memoirs on the simple country porch in a wicker armchair is iconic.

He’s bundled up, though it was mid-July. At that point, he’d shriveled down to a hundred pounds. Hidden by a scarf, the tumor between his neck and jaw was the size of a duck’s egg. He could barely speak and conversed through what his family called “pencil talks,” which were his scribbled notes. Dabs of cocaine water under his tongue relieved scorching pain, briefly, as did injections of brandy. Grant refused morphine because it clouded his mind. He had vicious choking fits. In March, he was thought to be on the brink of death but rallied. Grant worked on the corner of the wraparound porch so he could feel a cross-current breeze.

The first room in the house, entered through a door by Grant’s writing perch, was the office. As Grant finished a page on a large pad in longhand, it went to a secretary in the office, who typed Grant’s work on a 15-pound Remington typewriter with the newfangled “qwerty” keyboard, which we use today and that was aligned not alphabetically but by mixing the most- and the least-used letters so typebars wouldn’t collide and jam. Grant’s son, Fred, led the fact-checking and editing squad. In the corner is a case containing Grant’s signature wool cap, heavy black wool coat, and scarf. The office was also the nerve center for correcting the page proofs for both volumes.

The Grant family arrived at the Cottage on June 16 with their luggage, mostly clothing, and Grant’s “bed.” Owing to pain, Grant couldn’t sleep flat on his back. Two leather club chairs, placed front to front, created a place where he could both work indoors and sleep. Almost everything else in the house was provided by Drexel. The family left with only their luggage. Everything today is as it was.

The next room is Grant’s bedroom, where the leather club chairs were placed. During most of his five weeks at Mt. McGregor, he slept there. The house’s other six bedrooms were upstairs, and Grant could no longer climb stairs. The Grants left behind his clothing and his bottle of cocaine water. In a case, there’s a note to Drexel written by Grant thanking him and telling him he’d love to see him but not to bother. “I have such difficulty speaking I am no company.” The carpeting and the wallpaper are original.

Though the Balmoral professed to have no dew, no malaria, and no mosquitoes, it did not profess to have no noise. Once the Grants were there, the cottage became an attraction for hotel guests-turned-gawkers. The train was noisy, as was the Balmoral’s nearby generator, which hummed, buzzed, and belched through the evening.

On July 20, Grant worked on page proofs and his conclusion. In the afternoon, working from his sick room, he said, “There is nothing more to do,” put his pencil on the bureau by what was his bed and easy chair, and that was that. The printed books, written over a year, are 1,215 pages and 291,000 words. One of Clemens’s selling points to Grant in pitching a publishing deal was his marketing plan. Even before it hit the shops, the book would be sold by subscriptions peddled door-to-door all over the country by veterans dressed in their uniforms. Over 350,000 were sold in this manner. The return? Over a few short years, Julia got $420,000 in royalties, around $15 million in today’s money.

Late afternoon on July 20, Grant went to the cottage’s overlook to enjoy the view and the breeze. The next morning, he weakened. His wife and doctors moved him to the parlor, which was cooler and larger. The hotel sent a smartly designed desk contraption that opened into a commodious bed. An engraved portrait of Lincoln was placed over the bed. Reporters learned he was sinking. “Death Coming Very Near,” a New York Times headline read, getting the news right for a change. By the 22nd, Grant was bedridden. Julia never left his side. On the 23rd, morning light streamed into the parlor, illuminating Lincoln’s face. “Let us have peace” was Grant’s presidential-campaign slogan in 1868 — and peace finally arrived to the great man’s body and soul.

The parlor is still an eerie place. Still there are Grant’s bed, the Victorian wallpaper and carpet, drawn draperies, dark wood, an over-the-top porcelain clock, still stopped at 8:08, and two gargantuan flower arrangements, one sent by Leland Stanford, another by Cornelius Vanderbilt, now dried and taupe. After the Grants left, the cottage was unoccupied — mostly untouched — until 1890, when the Mount McGregor Memorial Association was established to care for it and conduct tours. In 1897, the Balmoral burned to the ground and was never rebuilt.

Grant Cottage has had ups and downs, in parallel with the life of Grant and the calculations of Grant’s merits as a president. These were, for generations, mostly abysmal. Scholars and, downstream, the general public have been joining a Grant revival starting around the 1980s. But government, in this case New York’s and always behind the curve, decided in 1985 to close the historic site. Few visited, we were told. Possibly, in part, this was because its closest neighbor was a prison.

New York State reversed itself after war whoops among Grant aficionados. Now, the place is neat as a pin, well organized, welcoming, rich in history, and both gripping and stirring. A strategic plan calls for nicer landscaping, better trails, and a bigger parking lot by the cottage. It sounds promising, but my view of improvements to historic sites that are already effective is “do no harm.”

The grounds and visitor center are free. The cost of the house tour is $5 to $12, a bargain. I would suggest making it free to confessed woke dopes. They need to sign an affidavit professing a will to repent for overlooking the immense sacrifice — hundreds of thousands of lives — incurred during the Civil War and afterwards in the cause of union, freedom, democracy, and reconciliation. Grant led the charge in each of these fronts, though many who followed him botched his life’s work. Grant is to be studied by those needing exemplars in real leadership rather than cackles and clichés.