Neddie Garfield's Death, a Spider Table and the Peanut Butter Quote Garfield Never Said

October 1876 ended happily for James Garfield: on the 31st he bought his farm in Mentor. But six days earlier, on October 25, the Garfields' youngest child, Edward — "Neddie" — had died at the family's home in Washington after a week-long bout of whooping cough.

Neddie Garfield. "His little baby ways so filled the house with joy that the silence he has left is heartbreaking," Garfield wrote to a friend that November. Credit: National Park Service, James A. Garfield National Historic Site.

A death in the family

Neddie fell ill earlier in October. On the 19th, Congressman Garfield wrote in his diary that "Little Neddie is still quite ill; but is not considered so ill that I may not safely leave." Four days later the boy was unconscious. He rallied on the 24th, but the doctors said there was no hope, and Garfield wrote that "the spectacle of that beautiful boy, struggling so bravely for life, fills me with the very helplessness of sorrow."

Neddie died the next morning at 9:30. His brothers and sister were heartbroken; their parents tried to give them "the better and more cheerful view of death," and six-year-old Irvin kissed his little brother and talked to him tenderly. A service was read in the parlor that evening, and his parents took his body by train to Ohio. He was buried in Hiram, next to his sister Eliza Arabella, the Garfields' first child, who had died on December 1, 1863.

The "spider" table

Visitors often gasp when they notice the inlaid spider, web and fly. Credit: National Park Service, James A. Garfield National Historic Site.

The delicate spider, web and fly inlaid in the rosewood top reflect the ornament favored by furniture makers who looked to the arts of Japan.

The quote that doesn't hold up

"Man cannot live by bread alone. He must have peanut butter!" is often attributed to James A. Garfield. He never said it — he couldn't have, because peanut butter did not exist in his lifetime.

• Peanuts became a commercial crop only in the early 1800s, used as animal feed and as a cheap but uncommon food. Soldiers on both sides of the Civil War took a liking to them, and Garfield probably got to know them in the army. In 1877, on a legal case in the South, he told his young son Abram about seeing peanuts — "goobers" — growing in a field in southern Alabama, and promised: "My Abe shall have some."
• Peanut butter came after him. Canadian Marcellus Edson patented a peanut paste for making candy in 1884; John Harvey Kellogg, whose brother founded the Kellogg's cereal company, patented peanut butter in 1895 as an easily digestible "health food" for sanitariums. It took off when C. H. Sumner offered it at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and in the 1920s pre-sliced bread made the peanut butter and jelly sandwich standard fare for schoolchildren.

Garfield did know Edgar Allan Poe's writing: a set of Poe's stories sits in the home's Memorial Library, and in October 1875 he mentioned reading "The Raven" and Poe's account of how he came to write it.

Sources

Based on "Garfield Telegraph October 2023," National Park Service (James A. Garfield National Historic Site), a work of the United States government in the public domain.