Lawnfield: the Ohio farm where the front-porch campaign was born

In 1880 thousands of people rode the train to a farm in Mentor, Ohio, got off in the candidate's own fields and walked up the path to hear James A. Garfield speak from his porch. They trampled the grass, camped on the grounds and helped themselves to the crops. It worked: Garfield became the twentieth President of the United States, and his farm, Lawnfield, became the birthplace of the "front porch" campaign.

The Garfield home and grounds. NPS

A congressman's farm

When the Garfields bought the farm in 1876, James Garfield had already been a teacher, an Ohio state senator, a Union general, and for thirteen years a congressman. He believed farm life would be good for his children, as it had been for him, and the land could bring in extra income. The farm also suited his public image as a "gentleman farmer," a man set against big-city political corruption.

In the 1870s the family grew wheat, oats, barley, buckwheat, corn, rye and hay, and kept pigs, horses, cows and poultry. When Congress was not sitting, Garfield experimented with soil improvements and with water. A bog on the property was cut off from the rest by a low rise, an "ancient shoreline," and he tried to use it with a ram.

What was a ram? A pump driven by the stream it sat in. Water ran through a pipe laid in a ditch, brook or bog, and its force worked a valve that built up water and air pressure in a metal globe. The pressure was released in sharp bursts, driving water up to a cistern or house. Rams were not new — many thousands of these "water engines" worked on American farms — but the Garfields' failed when the water ran low, the long pipe to the house was hard to keep up, and the valve clicked loudly and endlessly.

Lawnfield, about 1881. Library of Congress

The front porch campaign

The Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad ran across the northern end of the farm, which is how the crowds came: straight onto the candidate's land. Groups ranged from a few dozen to a thousand or more, and reporters from the New York Herald stayed a week. Garfield, the Republican, narrowly won the popular vote over the Democrat, General Winfield Scott Hancock. Later winners — Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley — ran front-porch campaigns of their own.

Garfield's campaign office at Lawnfield. Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress

After the assassination

Garfield was president for less than four months. He was shot on July 2, 1881, survived the shooting, and then suffered at the hands of his doctors, who brought on the infection that killed him on September 19, more than two months later.

His widow, Lucretia Rudolph Garfield, and the family set about honouring his memory and remaking the property:

• 1885–86 — a memorial library added to the house, now recognised as the birthplace of the idea of the presidential library.
• The family moved several buildings to give the front of the property a more suburban look, and hired J. Wilkinson Elliot, a Pittsburgh landscape architect, to design the grounds as a whole.
• 1894 — a Romanesque-style windmill on a stone pumphouse, both handsome and useful: it supplied water to the house and farm.

The windmill was built in 1894, taken off its pumphouse in 1930 and reconstructed by the Park Service in 1998. NPS

The pumphouse before reconstruction. Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress

What survives

Parts of the farm passed to the Garfield children and then to developers. The Western Reserve Historical Society of Cleveland began buying, preserving and interpreting the property in the late 1930s, and kept working on it with the Park Service after Congress created the national historic site in 1980, until 2008.

Mentor, looking west, about 1880. Today's site (red) is a small part of the 1880 farm (yellow). NPS / Harpers Ferry Center Art Collection

The 7.8 acres left run long and narrow from north to south. The house — a mix of Victorian Gothic, Queen Anne and Federal Revival — and its ornamental grounds are at the south end; the farm buildings, including the tenant house, carriage barn and windmill, are to the north. Large old trees cluster around the house: sugar maple, Cornelian cherry, black locust, white birch, mulberry and dogwood among them. An orchard of the historic kind grows again in the northwest corner, and small details survive — a watering trough, a hitching post, a carriage step.

Sources

Written from "James A. Garfield National Historic Site Cultural Landscape," National Park Service, a work of the United States government in the public domain. The park's Cultural Landscape Report (1994) and Historic Structure Report (1991) are on the NPS DataStore, and the HABS documentation and Garfield's papers are at the Library of Congress.