Today in history (1881) President James Garfield was assassinated. In our post a few days ago about the Mayflower, we talked about our Warren ancestors who were on the ship, the last of whom (in our line) Mehitabel Warren (a woman- hence Warren is not our last name). Her mother was Mehitabel Garfield. This has made the Garfield family super easy to research for us because they are our family too. Our shared X great-grandfather Edward Garfield came very early to the Massachusetts Bay Colonies and became a selectman. This puts us at six degrees of separation from the president, not an especially close cousin, but an interesting one. For a closer connection, we recommend looking at another (previously) Dallas blogger, Design Darling...
She is the president's X great-granddaughter and is now back in New England renovating a mid 19th century house with her husband who grew up in Dallas near us. In fact his mother is part of a close-knit secret facebook resale/recommendation group we are in for just our area of Dallas and her cookies (Highland Park Pie Lady) get recommended A LOT because they look amazing! Above is some of the renovated work she has shared recently on her house- fun to follow and she is a Garfield girl so relevant to today. Back to the original Garfields now: Edward (our shared many X great-grandfather) was one of the earliest landowners in Massachusetts and amassed quite a bit of real estate, including what became Gore Place (below).
This is obviously not the original house, but gives you an idea of what type of acreage he owned. Even today Gore Place is surrounded by land. Edward's son Captain Benjamin Garfield (who was the president's 4th great-grandfather and the brother of ours) had a house...that burned down, possibly by one of his servants. After that, his son Thomas and his son Thomas lived on in Massachusetts and we have a few details on where. A book written in 1880 says their house was in Lincoln "about two miles south of the centre of town." Below is the house called The Lincoln House in an engraving.
After this The Lincoln House (and farm) the president's Garfield great-grandfather moved to New York. Another engraving of this house called The Westminster House exists, shown below. We could not find evidence of these actual houses still existing. But this is the house the president's grandfather would have been born in and it was described as one of the finest farm houses of the time.
Garfield's father was born in New York but moved to Ohio, following a girl...and ended up marrying her sister. Then he died when the president was a baby and so the president like many presidents before and after him grew up in a log cabin of which there is only a replica.
The name of the house President Garfield lived in (aside from The White House) was Lawnfield. He ran his campaign from this white very Victorian looking house in Ohio.
Today this house is part of a historic park site and is painted gray as shown above. It houses the first presidential library (below).
The house interiors certainly scream Victorian as well. A bedroom is show below.
