THE BIRTHPLACE OF PRESIDENT HAYES:
A STUDY IN ORAL TRADITION
by
C. E. VAN SICKLE
Professor of History, Ohio Wesleyan University
and
JAMES T. MAY
The people of Delaware, Ohio, have long pointed with
pride
to the fact that their city is the birthplace of
President Rutherford
B. Hayes. A Delaware tradition so old that no one now
living
seems to remember anything about its origin, marks as
his birth-
place a two-story brick house, which it asserts his
father had built
and which stood until 1930 on the north side of East
William
Street, a short distance from Sandusky Street. So
strong was the
confidence of the Delaware citizenry in this story
that when the
Standard Oil Company of Ohio tore down the building to
make
room for a filling station, the Daughters of the
American Revolution
erected a marker to identify the spot. Recent studies
have raised
very serious doubts about the truth of the tradition
and have thrown
considerable light on its origin.
The reliability of the legend regarding President
Hayes's birth-
place was first checked by the prosaic evidence of the
deed books
preserved in the office of the recorder of Delaware
County, which
produced some surprising data. The brick house on East
William
Street stood on a parcel of real estate known on the
early plats
of Delaware as In Lot 66, for which a complete list of
owners
is available. The Hayes family never owned it, as can
be seen
from the following table, which covers the whole
period of their
residence in Delaware:
Grantor
Grantee Price Date Deed Book
Moses Byxbe Little $
30 9-15-1808 V. I P. 58
Little Kester 1195 3-10-1813 II 290
Kester Robinson 1300 10-18-1813 II 432
Robinson B.
Tuller 1350 1- 5-1815 III 379
H. Tuller Cox
(west l/2) 500 5-24-1822 XIII 93
H. Tuller L.
Tuller (east l/2) 500 9-20-1822 XI 497
Cox Goodrich
(west l/2) 350 4- 3-1837 XV 281
167
168 Ohio
State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly
As Rutherford Hayes, Jr., the father of the president,
came
to Delaware in 1817 and died on July 20, 1822,1 it
follows that
the Tullers and Cox were the owners of In Lot 66
throughout the
time when he was a resident of the town, and this
hard-fisted
Yankee trader certainly did not build a house on
another man's
land. The date for the construction of the brick house
on this
property is not clear, but the tremendous increment in
value be-
tween 1808 and 1813 (from $30.00 to $1,195.00) would
indicate
that it was between these dates, and that Little was
the builder.
However, Rutherford Hayes, Jr., did own a lot on
William
Street and was building a brick house on it at the
time of his
death.2 This parcel was known as In Lot 61,
and is located at the
northeast corner of West William and Franklin streets,
more than
a block west of In Lot 66. The deed abstract for it
during the period
when the Hayeses were in Delaware runs as follows:
Grantor
Grantee Price Date
Deed Book
H. Cellar D.
Cellar $ 152 6- 5-1816
V. III P. 539
D. Cellar Hughes 152 6- 5-1816 III 540
Hughes Meeker 180 8-18-1818 IV 377
Meeker R.
Hayes Jr. 300
12-20-1821 VI 60
S. Hayes Wm.
St. M.E. Church 1900 1- 1-1851 XXXI 152
This lot contained a frame dwelling house, erected at
an un-
known date before the Hayes family acquired it, which
after the
construction of the new brick house was used as a
kitchen.3 There
is no clear evidence as to when the Hayes family first
occupied
this property. Although they came to Delaware in 1817
and only
acquired title to In Lot 61 four years later, there is
no reliable
record of their having lived anywhere else. However,
William O.
Stoddard in his Lives of the Presidents states
that they occupied
the old house (In Lot 61) at the time of their first
arrival in
Delaware.4
1 Charles R. Williams, The Life of Rutherford
Birchard Hayes (2 vols., Boston,
1914), I, 6.
2 Charles R. Williams, Diary and Letters of
Rutherford Birchard Hayes (5 vols.,
Columbus, Ohio, 1922), I, 4.
3 Ibid.
4 William O. Stoddard, Lives of the Presidents (New
York, 1889), 8.
The Birthplace of President
Hayes 169
Of the Hayes family only the president
himself has left any
direct statements regarding his
birthplace, and these reveal a rather
surprising fact. Until Hayes was nearly
fifty years old he seems
not to have known the exact location of
his birthplace, and his
knowledge of Delaware street names was
extremely inexact. Thus
in 1856 he wrote some reminiscences of
his early life in which
we find the astonishing statement that
the house in which he lived
stood "on the northeast corner of
William and Winter Street."5
As the two streets named are parallel
to one another and a block
apart, the location is an impossible
one, the correct description being
William and Franklin streets. His first
mention of his birthplace
occurs in his diary under the date of
August 6, 1872. He quotes his
maternal uncle Sardis Birchard as
saying: " 'It was a gloomy night
when you were born. After your father's
death your mother had a
dreadful fever and was very weak when
you were born. It was in
the west room of the old house which
stands on William Street,
north side, east of Sandusky, or
Main.'"6 The care with which
the nephew recorded this evidence
indicates that it was the first time
he had heard it, but his interest in
the subject did not wane. As
late as July 27, 1890, he wrote:
"Judge Jones . . . took me in his
buggy to see Mrs. Sophia Wasson
White.... She says my father died
in the same house where I was born, on
William Street."7 Obviously
he was still collecting stray bits of
information regarding his birth-
place to the last years of his life.
Since Sardis Birchard was living with
the Hayeses at the time
of the President's birth,8 his
testimony should be carefully analyzed.
At first thought it seems to point
unmistakeably to the East William
Street location, but more careful
consideration shows that this
is not necessarily true. Mention of
"the old house" indicates one
with which both uncle and nephew were
thoroughly familiar, and
as the Hayeses had lived in the West
William Street brick house
since Hayes was a year old, we may
presume that Birchard was
referring to the old frame structure
which later served the family
5 Williams, Diary and Letters, I,
4.
6 Ibid., III,
212.
7 Ibid., IV,
590.
8 Ibid., I, 4.
170
Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly
as a kitchen. If he had meant the East
William Street house, one
would have expected a more detailed
description. Again, why
"the west room"? The
description would have been adequate for
the small frame dwelling on the corner
of West William and
Franklin streets, but quite ambiguous
if applied to the East William
Street house, which had at least two
west rooms in the brick front,
not to mention those in the frame wing.
At this point we should examine the
origin and validity of the
local tradition regarding the Hayes
birthplace. On June 22, 1876,
shortly after Hayes's nomination for
the presidency, Abraham
Thomson, editor of the Delaware
Gazette, wrote the following
article:
There are few readers of daily papers
throughout the United States who
are not by this time aware that
Rutherford B. Hayes was born in Delaware,
Ohio, October 4, 1822. There are a good
many persons, however, even in
Delaware, who do not know just where he
was born. It has been the
general understanding that his
birthplace was the old Hayes mansion which
was erected by his father and stood on
the northeast corner of William and
Franklin streets, the present site of
the Methodist parsonage. Such was
our belief until a few weeks since,
when in passing the locality in company
with the Governor, we referred to it in
that connection, when he corrected
the error by stating that he was born in
the brick house on the north side
of William Street a few doors east of Sandusky
now occupied by Mr.
Reichert as a furniture store.
Mr. Thomson had, at the time he made
this statement, been
a resident of Delaware for more than
forty years, having come
to the town in either 1833 or 1834, and
his testimony respecting
the tradition which prevailed before
1876 on the Hayes birth-
place can therefore be accepted as
final. Hence the year 1876
marks the disappearance of the old
tradition-universally accepted
until then-and the beginning of the new
one, which has prevailed
since that time.
There are several indications that the
Delaware citizenry ac-
cepted the new story eagerly, attaching
to it sundry features from
its discarded predecessor. Six days
after the Gazette article appeared,
C. H. Bodurtha, a local photographer, made
a photograph of the
The Birthplace of President
Hayes 171
East William Street house, which was
reproduced the same summer
in Russell H. Conwell's Life and
Public Services of Gov. Rutherford
B. Hayes.9 As Conwell visited Delaware and consulted a number
of older residents while collecting
information for his work, his
statement concerning the Hayes
birthplace tradition in 1876 is a
valuable source. He says: "The
house which Rutherford Hayes
built, and in which Gen. Hayes was
born, is still standing on
William Street, near Sandusky Street. .
. . Until recent events
called it to mind, the people had
forgotten that a family by the
name of Hayes ever lived there."10
From this it will be noted that some
features of the old tradition
died hard. Delaware could not
forget-and has never forgotten-
that Rutherford B. Hayes was born in a
brick house which his
father had built, but it had forgotten,
if indeed it had ever known,
that the Hayeses had once lived in the
East William Street house.
Thus embalmed in the printed word, this
hybrid tradition has
persisted ever since. The location to
which it points as the Hayes
birthplace is the brick house on In Lot
66, but the only house
which President Hayes's father ever
built in Delaware was the
West William Street brick house in
which his family lived from
the time of its completion to 1846. In
fact, it seems reasonable
to suppose that they had lived in the
old frame building which
later served them as a kitchen, at
least from the time of its purchase
in December 1821. If so, it would be
the actual birthplace of
President Hayes.
Since the present Delaware tradition
rest entirely upon the
assertion of President Hayes, and it in
turn upon that of Sardis
Birchard, we may well ask how the
latter came to make this state-
ment. We have seen that aside from the
mention of "William
Street, east of Sandusky, or
Main," the description fits the house
on In Lot 61 better than that on In Lot
66. Did he say "east" when
he really meant "west"? Did
Hayes, whose ignorance of Delaware
street names has been demonstrated
above, make a mistake when
he copied the statement into his diary?
In either case, the house
9 Boston, 1876, 25.
10 Ibid., 24-26.
172
Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly
on In Lot 66 happened to fit the entry
in his diary, and accordingly
he pointed it out to Mr. Thomson. That
he still entertained doubts
on the subject is evident from his
conversation with Mrs. White
in 1890.
The foregoing discussion cannot in all
fairness be considered
a definitive solution of the problem of
the Hayes birthplace, but
unless positive new documentary proof
in favor of the East William
Street location is discovered, the
balance of probability will con-
tinue to incline toward In Lot 61, the
site now occupied by the
William Street Methodist Church. But of
far greater importance
is the light which our study has thrown
upon the origin and growth
of the present Delaware tradition. It
cannot be construed as dis-
crediting local tradition as a
historical source, but it shows that
this type of source material is no more
exempt from the need of
careful scrutiny than are written documents.
If nothing else it
proves that each tradition must be
traced to its origin before its
value can be determined, and that
variant or conflicting traditions
should be weighed with the same care as
the accepted one.