Saratoga county is a major showcase for American history. There’s the French & Indian War played out on the upper Hudson River on the county’s eastern border, the Revolutionary War with the two battles of Saratoga and, it might surprise you, even the Civil War has a strong connection to the towns of Moreau and Wilton. The man who won the Civil War, served as president for eight years after the war and then died in a cottage in northern Saratoga County has become a major attraction for historic tourism.
Ulysses S. Grant came to Saratoga Springs by train at least three times in the 19th century before he died of throat cancer in that cottage on top of Mt. McGregor. The famous author Mark Twain came to the little cottage on Mt. McGregor to help the ailing general publish his memoirs and Twain promised Grant most of the profits from the sale of the book. Grant’s autobiography has never been out of print and many copies are sold in the Grant Cottage Gift Shop.
In May, 1884, seven years after leaving office, the 62-year old Grant had been swindled in a ponzi scheme and financially ruined. His mobility impaired by a fall on ice that winter, Grant learned that he had terminal throat and mouth cancer. Faced with no other means to provide for his family upon his death, he accepted Mark Twain’s offer to publish his memoirs, pushed himself to write them, and completed the work at Mt.
McGregor, while in excruciating pain, three days before his death.
Grant’s Memoirs was a major publishing event of the nineteenth century, proving to be a greater financial success than either Grant or Twain had hoped, and earning Grant’s survivors the equivalent of $12 million in today’s dollars. Twain devised an innovative way to market Memoirs, by enlisting veterans as canvassers wearing their GAR badges and trained with a script written by Twain to sell advance subscriptions door to door.
Webster began hiring 10,000 canvassers in March 1885, and 60,000 sets were ordered while Grant was alive. Orders increased so rapidly upon his death that Twain engaged multiple presses and binderies to run double time to complete the orders. By December 1885 the first printing of 200,000 copies was available for shipment domestically, and foreign subscriptions began to be filled.
Grant’s Memoirs are exceptionally significant as a work of nineteenth-century American literature. At a time when writers such as Twain were introducing regional vernacular dialogue into fiction, Grant’s direct conversational tone in Memoirs marked an unprecedented and authentic level of naturalism in non-fiction, a startling departure from the norm. Grant composed the bulk of Memoirs by dictation to a stenographer, following up with his manual editing of manuscripts and proofs. By the spring of 1885 the cancer had robbed Grant of the ability to speak. “He wrote as he talked, simple, unadorned, manly,” wrote political cartoonist Thomas Nast.
Grant’s medical condition worsened in March into April, taking him away from writing for much of that period, but improved enough to permit him to complete the draft of volume I and much of volume II before relocating from New York to Mt. McGregor on June 16.
Grant completed Memoirs in a “cottage” on the grounds of the recently opened Balmoral Hotel. This cottage had originated as a modest summer hotel built in 1878 atop the summit of 1,300-foot forested Palmertown Peak by lumberman Duncan McGregor.
McGregor called it the Mountain House and renamed the peak after himself. The Mountain House property was purchased in 1882 by the Drexel family and redeveloped as a larger and more fashionable resort linked to Saratoga Springs by rail and equipped with site-generated electricity, just the second hotel in the United States to have electric lights.
Grant and Twain edited the volume I proofs there between June 27 and June 29. After Twain left, Grant completed and edited the volume II manuscript, including extensive rewriting of his chapters on his meeting with Lincoln at Petersburg, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the preface and the conclusion, among the most personal and conciliatory sections of Memoirs. By this point, Grant was editing by listening to his stenographer read his own words back to him. The cancer had robbed him of the ability to speak.
Grant put down his pencil on July 19 and informed his stenographer that it was finished.
Grant Cottage today remains surrounded by much of the Balmoral landscaping and infrastructure present in the period. The hotel, which stood in 1885 within view of the cottage to its north, burned in 1897 and was not rebuilt. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company purchased the former hotel property surrounding the cottage in 1912 and redeveloped the grounds on the south slope below the cottage as a tuberculosis sanitarium for its employees. The sanitarium property was purchased by New York State in 1945 and its buildings adapted and operated for institutional use as the Mount McGregor State Veterans’ Rest Home (1945-1960), an annex of the Rome State School (1960-1965), the Wilton Developmental Center (1965-1975), and Mt. McGregor Correctional Center (1981-2014).
In 1985, Grant Cottage was going to be closed to the public by the state in an austerity move. During that time, local history buffs formed a volunteer group to keep it open to the public. That Friends Group still operates the site today and last year Grant Cottage was finally designated as a National Historic landmark. The Cottage remains a well-preserved time capsule of the six weeks when the Man Who Saved the Union fought and won his final battle against cancer and poverty.
