Grant Ulysses S. Grant's Boyhood Home

Buckeye Bill

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The Grant Boyhood Home in Georgetown, Ohio was the home of Ulysses S. Grant, 18th president of the United States. Grant's parents moved to this home from Point Pleasant, Ohio when Grant was an infant. Grant would stay in this house until he was accepted into the United States Army Academy at West Point, New York. In 1976, the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

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That's especially interesting in that it greatly resembles the house Grant and his family lived in while he was living and working in Galena, Illinois immediately before the Civil War. At some point a wooden porch covering the front door was installed, likely in the postwar period but has been removed:

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Very nice house..bigger than his birthplace.
I've proposed this theory before, but Grant is often - maybe even usually - portrayed as a "failure" when living in Galena supposedly eking out a living working for the charity of his successful brothers; to me the house he occupied there is exactly the sort he would've preferred: high up on a hillside in a quiet residential neighborhood of similar structures. Now comparing it with the house he grew up in, I imagine that to him the Galena house must've seemed exactly the sort of home in which to raise a family and a familiar "homey" place.
 
I've proposed this theory before, but Grant is often - maybe even usually - portrayed as a "failure" when living in Galena supposedly eking out a living working for the charity of his successful brothers; to me the house he occupied there is exactly the sort he would've preferred: high up on a hillside in a quiet residential neighborhood of similar structures. Now comparing it with the house he grew up in, I imagine that to him the Galena house must've seemed exactly the sort of home in which to raise a family and a familiar "homey" place.

I concur, James!

I like your brain....

Bill
 
I have an idea that "Grant was a failure before the war" is one of those oversimplifications that tend to stick to Grant. He began farming just before the Panic of 1857, a time when many people went bankrupt, and farmers were hit hard by rapidly falling prices. He would certainly not have been the only farmer who had to give up. Subsequent attempts to be a rent collector didn't play to his strengths, and selling firewood is not a high status occupation. Here again he may have been one of many those years, knocking around doing a bit of this and a bit of that. Certainly his career wasn't a resounding success, but his home life seems to have been satisfying, giving him the life he'd been missing during his lonely posting in the West. I wonder whether it's fairer to say that outside the army he struggled.
 
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