Buried: Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio
Nineteenth President - 1877-1881
Born: October 4, 1822, in Delaware, Ohio
Died: 11:00 p.m. on January 17, 1893, in Fremont, Ohio
Age at death: 70
Cause of death: Heart attack
Final words: “I know I am going where Lucy is.”
Admission to Hayes Presidential Center: $7.50
The disputed election of 1876 caused a near-rebellion when a fifteen-man Congressional commission, created to sort out electoral vote fraud, awarded the White House to Rutherford B. Hayes in a party-line vote. It earned Hayes, who had lost the popular vote, the derisive nickname “His Fraudulency.”
Hayes had promised not to seek a second term. In March 1881, he attended the inauguration of his successor, James Garfield, and happily left Washington for retirement in his native Ohio. The Hayes’s new life got off to an inauspicious start: the train in which they were traveling crashed, leaving two other passengers dead. Rutherford and Lucy Hayes were unhurt and continued the trip to Fremont and the home they had named Spiegel Grove.
In 1889, the much-admired Lucy Hayes suffered a series of strokes and died. The couple had been very close and Hayes wrote in his diary, “The charm of life left me when Lucy died.” He busied himself with public affairs, including service as a trustee of Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University.
In January of 1893, Hayes sat in a drafty train car en route to a university trustees meeting. Chilled, he felt ill throughout the meeting; at the station on his return to Fremont, Hayes suffered a heart attack.
Despite the concern of others, Hayes downed some brandy to restore his spirits and boarded the train for home. There, his doctor ordered the former president to his bed and for a while, Hayes seemed to improve. But on January 17, Hayes’s heart gave out; he died in the arms of his second son Webb, telling him, “I know I’m going where Lucy is.” Hayes was seventy.
News of Hayes’s death reached Washington. Outgoing President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation in honor of Hayes and ordered flags to fly half-staff. Harrison, a fellow Republican, elected not to make the trip to Fremont for Hayes’s funeral, although the incoming president, Grover Cleveland—a Democrat—did.
January weather in Ohio was bitter cold. The streets were covered in snow. Yet thousands of mourners, including Ohio governor and future president William McKinley, turned out. Public schools and businesses closed in honor of the former president.
Hayes’s body lay in state in Spiegel Grove’s dining room. Dozens of floral arrangements surrounded his cedar coffin and a large American flag covered one wall of the room. When the service began on the afternoon of January 20, the house was jammed with visitors. The Reverend J.W. Bashford, a friend of forty years who had married Rutherford and Lucy, read the 23rd Psalm and prayed for the dead president. In deference to the freezing weather, a brief military ceremony was also conducted inside the home. Veterans of Hayes’s 23rd Ohio Regiment served as pallbearers, escorting the casket to Fremont’s Oakwood Cemetery, where Hayes was buried next to Lucy.
In 1910, Hayes’s son Webb donated Spiegel Grove to the state of Ohio. The Hayes Presidential Center, the nation’s first presidential library, was established at the site. On April 3, 1915, the bodies of the former president and first lady were re-interred at Spiegel Grove, on a site just south of the family home. Their tomb was constructed of granite mined from Hayes’s father’s farm in Dummerston, Vermont. A marble headstone, designed for Lucy by Hayes, was also moved to Spiegel Grove. The stone was so heavy, a temporary rail line had to be constructed to move the stone to its new location.
The burial site for two of Rutherford Hayes’s horses, “Old Ned” and “Old Whitey,” can be found just outside the fence surrounding the presidential tomb.
Touring Rutherford B. Hayes’s Tomb at the Hayes Presidential Center
The Hayes Presidential Center is located in Fremont, Ohio, on the grounds of Spiegel Grove, the Hayes’s twenty-five-acre estate. It is open Tuesday through Sunday and closed Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. Hours are from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, and noon to 5:00 p.m. on Sundays and holidays. The library is closed on Sundays and holidays. Admission to the museum and home is $7.50 for adults, $6.50 for senior citizens, and $3.00 for children ages six to twelve. Admission for children under six is free. Special rates are available for groups. Visits to the gravesite are free. The grave is located on the south side of the Hayes home.
From the east or west: From the Ohio Turnpike (I-80/90), take exit 91/6. After leaving the turnpike, follow the signs for State Route 53-South. (This will take you onto the US 20 Bypass briefly, then back onto SR 53-South.) After approximately five miles, you will come to the junction of State Route 6-West. Turn left at the light (which is Hayes Avenue, but is not labeled). After the second light on Hayes Avenue, look for a flashing yellow light, about 2.2 miles from US 6. Turn right and immediately make a second right into the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center. The entrance to the center is at the corner of Hayes and Buckland Avenues. From the city of Fremont, follow the brown and white Hayes Presidential Center signs.
Stone marker at the Hayes Presidential Center
For additional information
The Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center
Spiegel Grove
Fremont, Ohio 43420-2796
Phone: (419) 332-2081 / (800) 998-7737
Fax: (419) 332-4952
www.rbhayes.org
“…Hayes proved to be the gold in the Gilded Age…”
—Richard Norton Smith
Elevated to the White House in 1876 amid rancorous cries of electoral fraud, Hayes proved to be the gold in the Gilded Age, a foe of the spoils system and a dedicated teetotaler whose feminist wife won immortality, and patronization, as “Lemonade Lucy.” Time was on their side: less than a year after leaving office, Hayes helped to bury the assassinated Garfield. In the summer of 1885, he rode in Grant’s funeral procession, sharing a carriage with none other than Chester Arthur, the onetime boss of the New York Customhouse whose removal Hayes had orchestrated, and who had gone on, against all odds, to become an effective reformer in his own right.
In June 1889, Hayes lost his greatest friend. “How easily I could let go of life,” he said in the wake of Lucy’s passing. On a Sunday in January 1893, he visited her grave in the cemetery near his handsome estate called Spiegel Grove. That evening he wrote in his diary of his longing to join her. At the Cleveland train station a few days later, Hayes experienced severe chest pains. “I would rather die at Spiegel Grove,” he said, “than to live anywhere else.”
Roger Bridges, former director of the Hayes Presidential Center, with C-SPAN consulting historian John Splaine at the Hayes tomb
On the night of January 17, his wish was granted. President-elect Grover Cleveland made the long train journey from Washington to attend Hayes’s funeral. “He was coming to see me,” said Cleveland. “But he is dead and I will go to see him.” The gesture would have touched Hayes, for, by his gallant action, Cleveland buried all the old charges about the disputed election of 1876, along with the man who had won it.
—RNS