Ulysses S. Grant spent the last six weeks of his life in a hilltop cottage in upstate New York, a few miles from the Hudson River. The former president was broke, having lost all his wealth in a Ponzi scheme, and he knew he was dying—but he was determined to finish his memoir first, in the hopes that its royalties would be enough to support his wife Julia after his death. Grant had been invited to use this cottage as a writing retreat by William J. Arkell and Joseph D. Drexel, investors in a nearby hotel. The men’s generosity was strategic: They believed that having a president living on the property would give it historic value.
Grant died there on Mount McGregor, too, at 8:08 a.m. on July 23, 1885, and the cottage has remained almost untouched since, a shrine to the former president which now welcomes visitors in the warmer months. In the parlor, the mantel clock is permanently set to 8:08, and in the dining room—shrouded in darkness most of the time—sit the same massive flower arrangements on display at the first memorial to Grant, held at the cottage before a large crowd on August 4, 1885.
Today, when a tour guide turns on the dining room lights, visitors see much the same sight those mourners did: a six-foot-tall gate—like that which might stand at heaven’s entrance but emblazoned with the president’s name—entirely constructed out of dried flowers. Nearby a sword made of flowers rests on an oversized pillow of flowers surrounded by smaller floral sculptures in the shapes of crosses, a heart, and an anchor. After 136 years, Grant’s tributes have been drained of their bright colors. The petals are caked in grime, and some have fallen off over the years. But the set pieces are mostly intact, which makes them a historical anomaly.
Funeral set pieces like these were not unusual in the 19th century. The trend toward floral displays started to take root in American culture in the late 1860s and remained popular into the early 1900s. Most were constructed of flowers known as pearly everlastings. The small, cottony blooms were bleached and dyed in various colors and arranged in large and elaborate designs. Sticks were tied to the flowers and inserted into moss enclosed within wireframes to hold them in place.
“These are the only known set pieces that have survived intact, and that is because this guy Drexel decided that [the cottage] should be a shrine to [Grant],” says Robert Treadway, floral historian and author of A Centennial History of the American Florist.