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This is an Annette on the Road post at Non-Boring History, in which your host, historian Annette Laing, plays tourist around the US and UK. Voiceover podcasts of NBH posts are normally only available to paid subscribers, but this time, it’s a free sample. Join us today to get every one Annette records! Note from Annette James Garfield belongs to that select group of American presidents whom people remember—if at all— for being assassinated. Look, I’m not an exception to “people”. I’m a historian, sure. Dr. Laing, that's me! But historians don't know everything about history. Not even in our own subjects. Not even close. Or close to close. Hoosen and I did not mean to stop at President James Garfield’s home. But while Hoosen was peering at our tires in this land-that-time-forgot-yet-cool gas station parking lot in Mentor, Ohio, I peered at Google Maps. I noticed we were a half mile from the James A. Garfield House, and that it’s owned by the National Parks Service. Sorry, libertarians, but even non-historian Hoosen has noticed that a federal government museum is a guarantee of high quality, and as is sometimes the case, as here, it means free admission. Think of the taxpayer value as I spread the word and you read it! Trust me, there's no commercial value in a Garfield museum, but there is value. This museum isn't about Garfield's extremely short presidency (100 days) much less his political career. It's about James Garfield’s home, and what happened to that home after his untimely death. Home, Sweet Home! Middle class Victorians—American and British— put the family home on a pedestal. Until now, the home for most Americans had been a workplace, a farm or a shop or a workshop, where the whole family worked together, ate, and slept. But big changes in the economy in the 19th century meant that many men of the new middle class now left the home to work, kind of the reverse of going remote. Such men now thought of home sentimentally, as a cosy refuge from a cruel and complicated world. Their wives (typically more educated than their predecessors) continued to stay home, but now had servants to do much of the drudgery. Middle-class women were encouraged to consider the home their domain. The Garfields were no exception. This estate, Lawnfield, is their home, and it appears largely as it did when Mrs. Garfield died. The lawn of its name would become more important than the field. When the Garfields bought Lawnfield, however, it was a working farm. Garfield bought this place because he wanted his kids to grow up on a farm, just like he had, only with more money. James Garfield thought that farms were an essential part of a great, healthy childhood. Which is striking, because James Garfield was an unlikely champion of the “good old days”: He helped usher in the modern age. Garfield fought in the Civil War, tried to improve civil rights and education for newly freed slaves, and even participated in the great money grab as the American “gilded age” began. He also added eleven rooms to his farmhouse to accommodate the family in comfort, so his commitment to the simple farm life had its limits. Yet James Garfield wasn’t entirely comfortable with modern life. Garfield had grown up in what historians call a “face to face” society, in which people mostly dealt with people they knew, or at least recognized. Even the “front porch” political campaign technique James Garfield invented harked back to an earlier time: On Lawnfield's front porch, he met voters. But he also met there with newspaper reporters who communicated his words around the nation and the world- very modern. Lawnfield, as a farm, was mostly cosplay for the Garfields. Most of the farmwork at Lawnfield was done by hired men. But James and the children also dabbled at farm chores, pitching hay to build character. James Garfield was a self-made and possibly a teensy bit corrupt politician (see Credit Mobilier scandal). I’ve written at Non-Boring History about an over-the-top monument to two of the most scandalous men involved in Credit Mobilier : So James Garfield was very much a man of the mid-19th century. He was torn between the modern world of cities and business, and the agricultural world of his youth that was fast disappearing. What I most enjoyed about visiting Lawnfield was that about 80% of the house furnishings really had belonged to the Garfields, which is very unusual for a house museum. Let me rush to add that I'm not one of those people who's super-interested in old furniture. No, what I liked about the Garfield house is that I felt (rightly or wrongly) that I could sense the family personality. No, no ghosts, please. I'm a historian, for heavens’ sake. I have some standards. No, okay, I don’t, I love ghost stories, but not today. Home Shadowy Home: American Victorians I love a gloomy, gaslit Victorian house. Yes, ok, the Garfield home is all-electric now for health and safety, but work with me here. The house is dark, cluttered, and makes me think of arsenic poisoning, and other morbid mid-Victorian subjects. Look, the problem isn’t me, at least I don't think it is. Victorians were weird, and especially the people I think of as mid-Victorians, a period I am going to date from 1851 to 1875, based on British historian Geoffrey Best’s definition of mid-Victorian Britain. In this case, those dates marking off the era work fairly well for America too. Oh, what the hey. If Geoffrey Best could decide when a historical period ends, so can Annette Laing! I say 1881 for the end of the mid-Victorian era. Oh, that's the year James Garfield died? You don't say. Perfect! 1881 it is! ANNOUNCEMENT from the NBH QUALITY CONTROL GNOME : Dr. Laing is correct that historians can argue for changes in commonly-accepted dates for the beginning and end of historical periods. Most historians, however, would consider changing the ending date of the British mid-Victorian era simply because a United States president, in Annette’s words, “snuffed it” that year is, however, unconvincing. Thank you. Mid- Victorians like James Garfield lived in an increasingly modern age, and yet death stalked the land like, as the old BBC historical sitcom Blackadder would put it, a giant stalking thing. Americans and Brits, especially those living in cities, were defenseless against disease. Antibiotics were almost a century in the future. Anesthetics and antiseptics were in their infancy. Germs were a new concept. Sewer systems and clean water were a novelty. Victorians were only just learning that illness wasn't a product of “bad air” (note those high ceilings and lots of windows in Victorian institutions). Result? Children, especially, died in horrifying numbers. James and Lucretia Garfield lost two kids in infancy, and James himself was named for a brother, James, who had died young. Get a little shudder at the idea of naming a child after a deceased sibling? Welcome to history! How gloomy is this hallway in the Garfield House? In fact, my wonderful phone camera automatically brightened up the room: It was actually darker than you see. Here’s Claire, our NPS tour guide (but without the intimidating Smokey the Bear uniform) who was full of energy, knowledge, and good cheer, which while appreciated, seemed at first to be all wrong for this setting. I was thinking we should have been led by some guy dressed as Lurch the Butler from the Addams family. This hall wasn't a welcoming space to strangers when the Garfields lived here. Most callers had to run through a selection process. When a servant greeted you at the door, she looked you up and down to see if you were suitable for admission. If you passed her first test, she invited you into this hall, and you deposited your visiting card on a waiting plate. A visiting card was basically like a business card, except that only your name was on it. If you graduated high school in the US, you may recall the company that expensively printed your graduation invitation also hit you up for visiting cards. A rip off, wasn’t it? Right. Anyway. So the servant now shows you into the reception area (entryway is in the photo above, next to the dude on the left who’s staring at the ceiling). Here you wait awkwardly, standing or sitting on a bench or upright chair, while the maid takes the card upstairs to the mistress of the house. She will decide whether to come down and receive you in the parlor, or whether she will instruct the maid to tell you she's unavailable (at least to you) and show you the door. Until then, you are not admitted into the family home. Indeed, there were sliding wooden “pocket” doors in this reception room which were closed so you can’t see into the family room or the dining room that leads off it. The pocket doors are now gone, but they were once there, as I pointed out to a surprised Claire the guide, who examined the doorways and confirmed my hunch, while everyone else wondered how that funny little British woman knew such a thing, or thought me some ghastly showing-off Karen. This reception area, created for the purposes of the odd little ritual I just described, wasn’t here when the Garfields moved in, or even when James died. It was originally the kitchen. The reception area was devised by Mrs. Garfield after her husband's death. That's because, in her very public widowhood, Mrs. Garfield had further converted the home from workplace to middle-class family sanctuary. On Garfield (man, not cartoon cat) James Abram Garfield may have been the poorest man ever to have ended up as President, and he was definitely the last United States President to be born in a log cabin, a type of tiny dwelling that definitely wasn’t a lifestyle choice in 1831. Not only was James Garfield’s family poor, but they got poorer: His dad, Abram, died when he was a baby, and he and his four siblings were raised in poverty by his single mother, Eliza.