Hello
and welcome back to our blog. In this
post we are visiting the second NPS unit in St. Louis, the homestead where
Ulysses S. Grant, the man who lead the Union Army to victory and later became
the 18th President of the United States, met his wife and struggled
to provide for his family before his rise to fame.
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| Entrance Sign |
BACKGROUND:
In
1843, a young West Point graduate named Ulysses S. Grant was assigned to a
posting at Jefferson Barracks outside the city of St. Louis. Grant’s friend and classmate Frederick Dent
was from the area and invited Grant to his family’s estate White Haven. There, Grant met Frederick’s sister, Julia,
whom he quickly fell in love with.
Following his service in the Mexican War, Grant returned to St. Louis and
married Julia. The relationship had its
controversies. Grant came from a
staunchly abolitionist Ohio family, while Julia’s father was a wealthy
slaveholding plantation owner.
Grant
resigned from the Army in 1854 and returned to St. Louis. Living at White Haven with Julia and her
family, Grant tried his hand at farming but ran into poor luck due to ruinous
weather and an economic downturn. Grant
worked a plethora of odd jobs trying to make a sustainable income for his
family, but he gave up farming in 1859, moving to Galena, Illinois to help with
his father’s leather business.
The
Civil War would see Grant rise to fame and fortune as a result of his military
prowess, becoming commanding general of all Union armies. After the war’s conclusion, dissatisfied with
the administration of Andrew Johnson, Grant ran on the Republican ticket in
1868 and was elected the eighteenth President of the United States.
The
Grants never returned to White Haven following the Civil War and the
Presidency, although Grant did continue to manage the affairs of the estate
from a distance. The property was given
to industrialist William Vanderbilt in 1881 to pay off a debt after Grant had
been swindled out of his fortune by an investor. Part of the property later bought by Adolphus
Busch, the co-founder of the Anheuser-Busch brewery, while the Dent home was
saved by the Wenzlick family, a local real-estate developer, until it added to
the National Park Service in 1989.
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| The Dent/Grant home at White Haven. |
THE HISTORIC SITE:
Ulysses
S. Grant National Historic Site is located in the southwest section of St.
Louis, Missouri. The site preserves a
roughly ten-acre area surrounding White Haven, the family home of Julia Dent
Grant where Ulysses S. Grant and his family resided in the 1850s. The site consists of the White Haven house,
several outlying farm buildings, a museum housed within a barn Grant had
constructed following the Civil War with the intent of using it to breed horses,
and a visitor center. The White Haven
home has been structurally restored but the interior is not furnished as most
of the Grant family’s pre-Civil War possessions were destroyed in a fire while
in storage during the 1870s.
TRAVEL TIPS:
Ulysses
S. Grant National Historic Site is a roughly twenty-minute drive from downtown
St. Louis. The site is open from 9am to
5pm year-round with major holiday exceptions.
There is no fee to enter the site or tour the home. The visitor center contains a short film. The White Haven house is not handicapped accessible
but the visitor center and museum are.
Passport stamps can be found in the visitor center.
ADDITIONAL PHOTOS:
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| Additional buildings at White Haven behind the house from left to right, the ice house, chicken coop, and summer kitchen. |
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| The visitor center (at left) and the museum (at right) at the site. |
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| A collection of personal items belonging to the Grant family on display in the museum. |
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