Lucretia Garfield’s later life: campaign wife, widow, library builder and snowbird

Lucretia Garfield was First Lady for only 200 days, and she outlived her husband by almost 37 years. This is the second part of a two-part profile from the National Park Service's James A. Garfield National Historic Site, written by Debbie Weinkamer, a lead volunteer there who portrays Lucretia, in February 2021. It covers her years as her husband's political partner, her brief time in the White House, and a long widowhood spent improving the family's Ohio farm into a country estate with a Memorial Library, and keeping her extended family close.

Political partner and First Lady

As a congressman's wife, Lucretia was James Garfield's sounding board and encourager, and she helped him write speeches. She was known as more at home in a library than a parlor during Washington's social seasons. In 1876 a change in the congressional district's boundaries led the family to look for a new home in the district, and Lucretia wanted more green space for her children. In October 1876 James bought the Dickey farm in Mentor, Ohio, about 25 miles east of Cleveland, promising her a home and a cow.

That farm, nicknamed "Lawnfield" by neighbors and reporters, hosted the country's first "Front Porch Campaign" after James became the compromise "dark horse" Republican nominee. Lucretia was scrubbing the kitchen floor when his telegram arrived. Over the summer of 1880 hundreds of visitors, reporters and job seekers came, and the normally shy Lucretia had to receive strangers, serve refreshments at a moment's notice and house important callers; her husband said she met every occasion with tact and faultless taste.

After the November election she went to New York City to buy dresses for her new role, and quietly gathered political information for her husband there, the home of Senator Roscoe Conkling, who would be the administration's biggest foe. She traveled as "Mrs. Greenfield" to avoid reporters. Her nearly two-week absence left James sleepless, as he wrote in his diary on January 31, 1881, and he rode down the farm lane to glimpse her train passing Mentor. The marriage that had begun on the cold word "duty" had become an affectionate partnership.

Lucretia R. Garfield's inaugural gown. Smithsonian Institution.

On Inauguration Day, March 4, 1881, the inaugural ball was held at the Smithsonian's new National Museum building. She wore lavender satin trimmed with point lace and a corsage of pansies. As First Lady she kept a diary, set calling hours, settled her children into new schools and began researching the White House's history and furnishings at the Library of Congress. Her plans to restore it were never carried out: she developed life-threatening malaria in May 1881 and was recovering at Long Branch, New Jersey, when word came that the President had been shot at the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station. She spent the next 80 days nursing him and won wide admiration. He died on the evening of September 19, only 200 days into his term, and she sat quietly beside him for a time.

The Garfield children at the Executive Mansion, by Mathew Brady Studio, about 1881. Left to right: Mollie, James, Harry, Irvin, Abram. Library of Congress.

Widow and builder of a memorial

She received hundreds of condolences, including a letter and a funeral wreath of white tuberose from Queen Victoria. Newspapers called her "Discreet Crete" and the "Vanishing First Lady" because she avoided publicity. Her aims were to raise her five children, then 8 to 18, to turn the Mentor farm into a country estate, and to keep her husband's memory alive. A Subscription Fund started by Cyrus Field and other eastern industrialists, with donations from ordinary people across the country, totaled $360,000 and was placed in a New York bank, paying her interest that let her educate the children and keep Lawnfield.

She wrote to her son Abram that the house seemed a more interesting monument to his father than anything built only as a monument.

Memorial Library. NPS photo.

Vault. NPS photo.

Family matriarch and snowbird

Lucretia outlived her husband by almost 37 years. She saw her children educated and married, two of them in the Memorial Library in June 1888, and had 16 grandchildren. She added a gasholder after finding natural gas on the farm, and gas lights, fireplaces and a cookstove, and a well, windmill, water tank and carriage house. In 1900 she and daughter-in-law Helen hired landscape architect J. Wilkinson Elliott to plan driveways, paths and plantings that tied the family's properties together. What began as almost 160 acres had grown to roughly 400 acres of "Garfield family compound": Eastlawn, Lawnfield, Hollycroft and Willoughbrook Farm.

She wrote to each new grandchild as a baby, gathered everyone at Lawnfield each summer and at Christmas, the last in Mentor in December 1898, when the grandchildren staged a skit about the Rough Riders. She helped her second son James R. found Mentor's free public library, donating books and a piano, and with Mollie and her sister-in-law Lide Rudolph she organized the Miscellany Club in 1898, which still exists. She was a trustee of Hiram College until 1895 and helped the Red Cross in World War I.

Around 1900 she began wintering in southern California, first visiting Mollie, then staying at a railroad hotel and renting on Colorado Boulevard. In 1903 to 1904 she bought a corner lot in South Pasadena and had a winter home built by Greene & Greene, who were distant cousins. It resembles a Swiss chalet and looks over the San Gabriel Mountains.

Death and legacy

Lucretia died of pneumonia after a brief illness at her South Pasadena home on March 13, 1918, with Mollie at her bedside, a month short of her 86th birthday. She was buried beside her husband at Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland. The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that she gave her heart to her children and devoted herself to charity and kindness.

Lucretia R. Garfield's casket beside her husband's flag-draped casket at the Garfield Memorial, Lake View Cemetery, Cleveland. NPS photo.

She kept a hopeful outlook through the tragedies in her life, and stayed interested in art, literature, science, religion, education, politics and current events. She left five surviving children, 16 grandchildren and 45 great-grandchildren.

Sources

• National Park Service, James A. Garfield National Historic Site, "Lucretia R. Garfield: A Remarkable Life Part 2", by Debbie Weinkamer, February 2021 (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/lucretia-r-garfield-a-remarkable-life-part-2.htm); rewritten in hubnx's own words.