Historical
GEORGE HENRY YEWELL (1830–1923)
General Grant’s Parlor, Drexel Cottage, Mount McGregor, New York, 1885
Oil on canvas, 15 x 19 in.
Signed and dated (at lower left): Geo. H. Yewell—1885.
RECORDED: Maureen C. O’Brien and Patricia C. F. Mandel, The American Painter-Etcher Movement, exhib. cat. (Southampton, New York: The Parrish Art Museum, 1984), p. 55 // “Art on the Mountain,” Slideshare, slide 22 illus. in color
EX COLL.: sale, Carlsen Gallery, Freehold, New York, January 15, 2006; to private collection, 2006 until the present
Yewell's General Grant’s Parlor, Drexel Cottage, Mount McGregor, New York is a rare instance in which he painted an indoor scene of an American subject. The scene is devoid of people yet replete with historical significance. Indeed, the image provides us with a glimpse of the living room at Drexel Cottage, at Mount McGregor, in Wilton / Gansevoort, New York, where former two-term president and Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant spent the last five-and-a-half weeks of his life. (For a comprehensive study of the last year of Grant’s life, including a detailed account of his time at Drexel Cottage, see Thomas M. Pitkin, The Captain Departs: Ulysses S. Grant’s Last Campaign [Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973].)
In the spring of 1885, Grant was living on New York’s Upper East Side, where––his health failing from his recent diagnosis of throat cancer and his finances depleted by the misdoings of a corrupt business partner––he was heroically struggling to complete his Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, a candid chronicle of his life up until the end of the Civil War that he hoped would establish his legacy and provide an income for his wife and family. (Grant’s project was funded by Mark Twain, who provided him with a generous $25,000 advance to write his autobiography.) On June 16, seeking respite from the heat and pollution that would soon descend upon the city, he retreated with his family and his physician, John Douglas, to Drexel Cottage, a private, twelve-room dwelling that was owned by the banker and philanthropist Joseph William Drexel (1833–1888), who extended the invitation to the former president in the first place. Having acquired ownership of Mount McGregor in 1881, Drexel and a group of investors that included William J. Arkell had developed the site into a popular tourist resort, constructing the Saratoga, Mount McGregor and Lake George Railroad in 1882 and the elegant Hotel Balmoral in 1884.
Situated at the summit of 1,300-foot Mount McGregor, Drexel Cottage was the perfect sanctuary for Grant: offering clear mountain air and stunning views of the Green Mountains to the east, the Catskills to the south, and to the north, the mighty Adirondacks. The Queen Anne style house, which included an open, wrap-around porch on three sides, was only nine miles from Saratoga Springs, a fashionable vacation spot for well-to-do New Yorkers who, like Grant, took great delight in the scent of the verdant northern pines and the cool, nighttime temperatures. Not surprisingly, Grant’s pending relocation upstate was noted in the press: a reporter sent in advance to Mount McGregor by the New York World described Drexel Cottage as a “modest-looking two-story framed building” that has just been given a “new coat of old gold paint with neat brown trimmings... The family room was artistically papered and veneered,” while another source noted that the “general’s sleeping room was furnished with a mahogany suite and wickerwork couch, rocker, and settee” (as quoted in Piktin, pp. 61 and 62, respectively). A reporter from the New York Times also weighed in on the accommodations, stating:
A wide piazza extends around three sides of the house. Mr. Drexel’s idea was to have the cottage comfortable without making it luxurious. Gen. Grant’s room will be in a corner of the house, on the first floor facing the piazza. There will be no steps to mount, and he can walk out on the verandas and enjoy the scenery. No food will be cooked in the house in order that the temperature may not be too high. The General and his family will receive their meals from the hotel (“Strength for Gen. Grant,” New York Times, June 12, 1885, p. 5).
Grant completed his memoir on July 18, 1885. (Grant’s two-volume narrative was published in New York during 1885–86 by Charles L. Webster & Co., a firm established by Mark Twain in 1884.) Sadly, he passed away at Drexel Cottage five days later on July 23, at 8:06 am. As noted in contemporary newspaper accounts and related sources, Grant’s popularity was such that in the wake of his highly publicized death, people flocked by train to Mount McGregor to pay their respects while he lay in repose in the parlor––under the watchful eye of regular army soldiers and devoted veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic who guarded the house and its grounds, remaining on the site even after the ex-president’s funeral train departed for New York on August 4. Aware that his unpretentious mountain house was now an ex-president’s shrine, Drexel decided to leave the furnishings, décor, and other possessions “as they were in the general’s lifetime,” issuing an announcement in which he declared that “the cottage will never be occupied by any family or persons” and indicating his desire to eventually “present it as a gift to the American people” (Pitkin, p. 117). Drexel kept his word: following his death in 1888, the Mount McGregor Memorial Association obtained title of the cottage and opened it to the public as a historic site in 1890. Known today as Grant Cottage, the building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2021 and operates under the aegis of the State of New York.
