The Home & Deathbed of an Underrated President | History Traveler Episode 116

[Applause] presidential history is something that has always been quite fascinating to me and if you look at you know presidential politics today you can see some similarities to you know those of the past and in some ways how it's different uh so you know today whenever somebody is running for president they're barnstorming the country they're giving speeches they're holding rallies well imagine a president or presidential candidate who ran for president and never left their front porch well that is how benjamin harrison our 23rd president did it and we are in indianapolis at his home so today we're going to be looking through the home of our 23rd president benjamin harrison [Music] all right so just rolled in here into the benjamin harrison home and i'm standing in the front foyer and uh kind of excited to get in here and take a look around because i found out that this presidential home is kind of unique like upwards of eighty percent of the furnishings in here are original to the home uh now of course i don't know everything there is to know about benjamin harrison or about benjamin harrison's home but i'm with somebody who does this is daniel and uh he is one of the like historical interpreter how would you describe yourself uh technical title is the experience manager experience man there's a lot of tours here basically teach the public about the legacy of benjamin harrison okay awesome so we're going to go through the house and yeah see what we can see [Music] so right off the bat whenever you come into the home you're going to be looking at the front parlor and have a painting up here of benjamin harrison now one thing that's nice about this home is that you can really walk into any room of the home as the people who lived here would have been able to do except for in this room this one is roped off because the carpet is original to the time period this was made in the 1860s so this one's ripped off but we'll be able to go and look at any of the other rooms all right coming out of the foyer now and holy smokes look at this spiral staircase how nice is that and i mean if you look at the craftsmanship that was put into making this hand railing pretty impressive we're going to cover the first floor first and then we'll we'll jump up to the second level just a little bit okay i'm now entering into the uh back parlor which this would have been like more of a a family room and uh my goodness there are so many things here to see i don't even know where to start but daniel told me that if i stand right here in this very spot this is where benjamin harrison stood to accept the nomination for the republican party whenever he was running for president so i don't know pretty cool to be standing where you know some of these historic moments took place now as i mentioned most of the furniture in this house is original to the home so this would have been benjamin harrison's uh own personal chair uh you notice this one is a little bit slimmer this would have been for his wife and then just so many little little details in this home like these are their original calling cards how fascinating also here in the back parlor is a portrait of benjamin harrison's grandfather william henry harrison making benjamin and william henry harrison the only grandfather grandson pair of presidents that we've ever had and of course william henry harrison's probably best known for having the shortest term in office so this is the regina phone here this is a very interesting piece kind of right smack dab in the middle of two technology so you have a player piano you know from your old western style movies and then a record player so uh to kind of use layman's terms underneath the regina phone there's essentially a xylophone it's got bristles on top of it and then the brakes in the copper kind of let it know what notes to play so just like a record player you could really switch these out if you needed to they would only last about 30 seconds so you have to take that with some grain of salt you will be getting up every 30 seconds but we can quickly listen to one of the newer discs that we have [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] that is cool as heck i have never seen one of those just an interesting piece of technology yeah so we're coming on into the library the office the study whatever you'd really like to call it this is personally my favorite room because it was benjamin harrison's favorite room so i'll have you pan over here we have a series of portraits up on the wall benjamin harrison really comes from a long line of really political dynasty so to say so you have benjamin harrison v up here so he's an original signer of the declaration of independence he's the first man to read the declaration out loud he also is representing virginia in the in the continental congress along with george washington so he's actually signed if you want to check this out underneath thomas jefferson here so you see thomas jefferson right there and then below you see a very tiny ben harrison oh huh his son over here william henry harrison who we talked a little bit about in the back parlor so um commanding general in the war of 1812. he's the indiana territorial governor so he really has the kind of the two pillars to be a great president but of course dies about 31 days into office now you come over here to one of one of the most forgotten men at least in terms of this political dynasty and that's going to be benjamin harrison's father this is john scott harrison he does a couple terms in the ohio state house of representatives but really spends most of his life as a farmer so a lot of benjamin harrison's early money was actually sent back to north bend where he is originally from to help support his family now here we have a beautiful bookcase here the story behind this really is that benjamin harrison he won an immigration case for a german immigrant that person could not afford to pay him but they did have a craft and so they built him this to repay him for his service so benjamin harrison was an incredibly successful lawyer i would argue one of our most successful lawyer presidents so if you knew you had many other cases coming down the line i think this is a pretty good way to be repaid now you may wonder over here why do we have a portrait of abraham lincoln so um benjamin harrison was an ardent supporter of lincoln he left the whig party to become one of the first republicans in the state gave over 80 speeches to help lincoln get elected and that portrait is very special because that is actually what's set next to his casket when he was in the indiana state house here so he took um kind of a tour back to springfield to be buried after he was assassinated and he did stop in indianapolis so that was painted by jacob cox a famous indianapolis painter and they kind of joke that the oil wasn't even dry before he arrived in indianapolis wow another thing i'll bring you over is this i mean we have benjamin harrison himself saying this is one of the most important things he ever did so he was um he did serve in the civil war so he eventually became a brigadier general after the war so he was promoted um after the civil war and we have him saying beyond being a senator beyond being a great lawyer even beyond being president the most important thing benjamin harrison ever did was serve in the civil war so you can see that this is signed here by abraham lincoln in the bottom right hand corner this was also signed in march of 1865 and abraham lincoln would be assassinated in april of 1865. so i cannot tell you this is the last thing he signed but i can certainly tell you it is one of that is incredible you also see the secretary of war signed as well and if you can you may be able to see it if you can see abraham lincoln signed his full name he very often wrote just a period lincoln so for tim to sign his full name really kind of speaks to maybe the personal relationship that he and benjamin harrison had [Music] wow so here's another thing in this room that i just found fascinating this desk right here is one that benjamin harrison used in the white house now it's not the resolute desk that was in like the main oval office this would have been off in a side room and then something else that came from the white house was this bookcase and there are just all kinds of little things in here that you almost have to just come and see here's a gift that was given to harrison from a gentleman in texas and of course during the era we've seen before that canes were really a big thing so there's a lot of different handcrafted canes as well now this deer right here was not shot by benjamin harrison uh but you know i talk about teddy roosevelt quite a bit him being my favorite president uh benjamin harrison also a conservation-minded president i didn't know this before visiting here but uh there were three parks that were formed under his presidency including yosemite and sequoia national park so yeah that's that's pretty interesting so real quick i want to point out here in the library uh these are originals of the complete works of charles dickens that belonged to harrison and he was also you know a man of faith and an elder in the presbyterian church here are his presbyterian bibles so harrison unlike many presidents is widely regarded as being a a real straightforward honest man and i'm sure his faith had much to do with that [Music] all right so now we're walking into the kitchen area where the meals would have been prepared and something that was pointed out to me is they still have the original gas fixtures here in the home but benjamin harrison was the first president to have electricity in the white house but he was afraid to touch the switches because he thought he might be electrocuted here's something else that i really kind of found interesting is they've got this uh well pump right here rigged up in the kitchen so there would have been a a cistern that would have supplied water directly to the kitchen area so he was really kind of a forward-thinking guy you know his house being built in the 1870s and all very very interesting i'm hanging out in the butler's pantry right now and you can see all of this china a lot of this was painted by his wife caroline which is kind of interesting she was kind of a renaissance woman there's not uh as much known about her as what i think there really should be but when you learn more about her um she she was really something else yeah this is interesting all right moving on now to the dining room so we are here in the dining room so i want to show you a couple things around here this is their original table and chairs here so you would have had benjamin down here on this end caroline down on this end i can tell you if you're wondering the food is not real i hear that asked quite often but the food is not real um what is real though this is their original flatware around here this is not their china that you see it is wedding china from the time period actually from someone from this north delaware neighborhood in indianapolis but it is not their china something i always love to point out because it really shows kind of the depth of the money that the harrison family had is this right here this believe it or not is actually their pickle jar so actual silver crystal it has little tongs here on the side uh when you come and visit the benjamin harrison presidential site if you take a tour with me that's always something that i like to ask but it really just goes to show the level of wealth they had another kind of thing that shows that is if you see their draper either drapery hangs to the floor that is a sign for their visitors or their guests that they have money so they didn't need to cut the roll at a certain length they could just buy the entire roll and wherever it fell it fell and once again that showed their guests that you were entering a very powerful and wealthy home looking at some of the china here in the dining room right now and this is lincoln china right here so this would have been in the lincoln presidency and caroline decided to design her own china which was something new kept the same style and kind of that that same centerpiece that you see with the the eagle but gave it a little bit of a different flair and a little bit different colorations but wanted to keep it the same as the style of the lincoln china because of how highly harrison thought of abraham [Music] lincoln okay well that's the first level now this house actually has three levels so we're going to go to the top and then kind of work our way back down just going up this spiral staircase here all right i'm coming up here now on the third floor now this would have been originally kind of like a ballroom area and they use the space now for a rotating display so right now the the focus of the display is uh women's suffrage so you can't just come here once you can keep coming back and there's always going to be something different but what i found particularly interesting up here is all of this that you see is the original law office furniture that benjamin harrison used huh and then that is the original sign for his law practice i i just can't get over all of the original presidential stuff that they have here in this home [Music] we just made it up here to the second floor and here's a painting of benjamin harrison during his time in the civil war so this is one of the the few images this was painted from a photograph one of the few images that we have of harrison as a middle-aged man okay so here on the second level entering now into mary's room mary would have been one of the daughters of benjamin harrison and yeah you can just see all kinds of of interesting things here including this this dress now this is not a childhood dress this would have been her adult dress and then of course the bed that she would have slept in now over here this would have been kind of like a changing room or like a giant walk-in closet here at the museum they have it set up as a bit of a nursery and here's what i really found interesting this crib right here was the crib that benjamin harrison had as a baby this is 187 years old and this is the crib that his dad would have had that's over 200 years old and then this portrait right here is benjamin harrison's grandson whose name was also benjamin's the largest portrait in the house yeah pretty cool correction this is the second largest portrait in the house we're getting ready to see the largest all right moving now into uh the sitting room and holy smokes here is the largest portrait in the house uh this is of benjamin's wife caroline who was also the first president of the daughters of the american revolution and there are just all kinds of little interesting things really throughout all this whole house but but in this room as well so here's this giant fan that was made out of ostrich feathers that was given to caroline uh here is one of her paintings so again very very artistic individual and this is also her original easel now i mentioned how 80 of the stuff in the house is original to the house this piece is not this is actually a dutch piece from the 1600s that was given to the to the harrison home so that's not original but it is it is quite impressive and then here's of course a picture of benjamin harrison with his grandson benjamin harrison was the first president to pass an endangered species act so he was kind of an animal lover had some pets there at the white house you can see in this picture they had a pet goat named whiskers that would pull the grandkids around and uh he also had a couple pet possums and you know some other other animals there at the white house now here's here's what i found most interesting in this room and that's this right here this is a letter that was written to caroline from helen keller and it is the first publicly published letter that helen keller ever wrote and it says dear mrs harrison please receive these sweet messengers of the south and let them speak to you in voices soft and low of the love and tender sympathy of a little unknown friend helen keller huh that is really something else we've moved out of the sitting room and are now in the next room which is benjamin harrison's bedroom and here's a picture of harrison as a young man and something that i thought was pretty cool if you go over here apparently harrison like to stay fit got a little exercise gear right here got some dumbbells got some more clubs got some resistance bands but really the the thing in this room that is the most interesting at least to me is this right here in 1901 benjamin harrison came down with pneumonia and was laid up in this bed right here and this is where he drew his final breath [Music] huh [Music] all right well that was the benjamin harrison home now and one thing i do need to clarify i found out that this this porch right here that i mentioned in the beginning wasn't added until after benjamin harrison returned from his time as president but he would have given his campaign speeches from from right there at his front door on the steps that were coming down i learned a lot here today and really benjamin harrison is often regarded as like in the bottom half of our presidents but for a guy who only served for four years he accomplished a lot there were six states that were added during his term north dakota south dakota wyoming montana idaho washington he pushed for civil rights legislation uh he he was forward thinking on ecological issues uh and unlike many presidents was regarded as an honest man so uh yeah i don't think i would mind having another president like uh like benjamin harrison now we did mention that that harrison breathed his final breath right here in this home he's also buried here in indianapolis at a place called crown hill cemetery and we're going to head there right now but if you're ever in indianapolis come to this place you're going to see an original victorian style home the home of one of the presidents and you're going to learn a lot i i really really am glad that we stopped here [Music] today [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 261,710

Rating: 4.9594626 out of 5

Keywords: history, history travel, travel, indiana, indiana history, indiapolis, things to do, president, president home, harrison home, benjamin harrison, victorian home, deathbed, history underground

Id: hxT8Hq5ORDs

Length: 24min 31sec (1471 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021