How the Eisenhower Farm Became Eisenhower National Historic Site, 1967

Mamie and Dwight Eisenhower hand the deed to their Gettysburg property to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, November 27, 1967. Eisenhower National Historic Site.

Rangers at Eisenhower National Historic Site in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, are asked almost every day how the farm became a park. The answer: the Eisenhowers gave it.

The transfer

On November 27, 1967, with a few signatures, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower's farm — the first and only home they ever owned — became Eisenhower National Historic Site.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, who praised their decision to donate the home and land, sent Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to accept the deed in person, along with White House aide and speechwriter Horace "Buzz" Busby to observe.

"No ceremonies, no signing, no onlookers"

Two days later Busby described the visit in a letter to Johnson. The helicopter landed at the farm in mid-afternoon; the sun was out but "the wind was biting," and the former president, in poor health, had been asked to stay inside. "He emerged anyway," Busby wrote, to greet them.

The Eisenhowers took their guests to their favorite room, the glassed-in back porch, where moments before Ike had been painting and Mamie playing solitaire. "Our conversation was cordial and simple, no ceremonies, no signing, no onlookers," Busby wrote. But feelings ran deep for Dwight, then seventy-seven, and Mamie, seventy-one: "Repeatedly," Mamie's "eyes welled with tears as she talked" about what the home meant to her.

After a tour of the "very handsome rooms of the house," Udall and Busby left with the deed. "As we left," Busby wrote, "the General decided to walk us to the helicopter, even without his coat and hat." He thanked Johnson for the "mission to Gettysburg": "a memory to last a lifetime."

Afterward

• Soon after, the Eisenhowers went to Palm Desert, California, for the winter.
• Before he could return, Eisenhower had his third heart attack and spent his last ten months at Walter Reed hospital. He died there in March 1969, never having come home to Gettysburg.
• Under a special use permit from the National Park Service, Mamie lived on in the house until her death in November 1979.

Sources

Based on "When the Eisenhower Home Became the Eisenhower National Historic Site," Eisenhower National Historic Site, National Park Service, quoting Horace Busby's letter to President Johnson; a work of the United States government in the public domain.