Adapted from the November–December 2023 Garfield Telegraph*, the newsletter of James A. Garfield National Historic Site. The site's seasonal hours and events from that issue are not repeated here.*
Abram Garfield: artist and architect
The decorative tiles around the dining room fireplace in the Garfield home were a family project. Lucretia Garfield and her children, Harry, Jimmie, Mollie, Irv and Abe, painted them along with "a family friend." Abram was 7 years old when he painted his.
All the Garfield children liked to draw, paint and work in watercolor throughout their lives, but only the youngest, Abram, born November 21, 1872, made a career of it. He graduated in 1893 from Williams College, where his father and three brothers had also studied, and then studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating in 1896.
Garfield became an architect in Cleveland. In 1898 he went into partnership with Frank Meade, a firm that survives today as HSB Architects & Engineers. He had clients across the country, among the most notable Ohio Representative Chester Bolton and his wife, Representative Frances Payne Bolton, who succeeded him in Congress. Garfield designed their Palm Beach, Florida, home, Casa Apava, built around 1920, which sold for more than $70 million in 2015. His later tile work can be seen at the estate.
Hayes and Garfield: a study in similarity
James A. Garfield (left) and Rutherford B. Hayes (right) in their official presidential portraits. The White House.
The 19th and 20th presidents of the United States led lives that ran parallel in many ways.
| Rutherford B. Hayes | James A. Garfield | |
|---|---|---|
| Born in Ohio | Delaware, Ohio, 1822 | Orange (now Moreland Hills), Ohio, 1831 |
| Raised by one parent | father died before he was born | father died when he was 16 months old |
| Large family | eight children, three of whom died before age 4 | seven children, two of whom died before age 4 |
| Lawyer | law degree from Harvard Law School, 1845 | read law with attorney Albert Riddle; admitted to the Ohio bar in 1861 |
| Civil War major general | by brevet | full rank |
| Elected to the House during the war | 1864 | 1862 |
Both men worked to secure the civil and political rights of African Americans, and both pressed for civil service reform as president.
Their papers found homes in different ways. The Hayes family created the first presidential library open to the public, which holds Hayes's public and private papers and opened in 1916. At the Garfield home, a memorial library was added in 1885–1886 under Lucretia Garfield's direction, with a vault for the president's papers. Both began as private family spaces; the library opened to the public in 1936, while the vault stayed closed to view.
Sources
- National Park Service, James A. Garfield National Historic Site, "Garfield Telegraph Nov. and Dec. 2023." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/garfield-telegraph-nov-and-dec-2023.htm
- The newsletter's collage of Abram Garfield, his tile and the houses he designed is credited partly to a private publication and is not reproduced here.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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