Spotlight on History
Onetime Ravenna school teacher ended up in the White House
This is the first in a series of Women’s History Month columns dealing with noteworthy Portage County women
By Roger Di Paolo
Lucretia Rudolph had more reasons not to marry her future husband than to marry him.
He was the son of a divorced mother who doted on him. Brilliant — he was said to be able to write Greek and Latin simultaneously because he was ambidextrous — he also had a hard upbringing that included a roustabout existence as a canal hand before he settled down and went to school. He was handsome, but almost too good looking for his own good. And he was a womanizer who admitted entering into matrimony out of a sense of duty rather than love.
Her father, Zebulon Rudolph, a prominent landowner in the Hiram-Garrettsville area, made no secret of his reservations about his shy, reserved daughter’s choice of a life mate. He thought his eldest child was marrying beneath her station in life to a man with dim prospects.
Despite all of this, Lucretia “Crete” Rudolph, a Garrettsville native, married James Abram Garfield on Nov. 11, 1858, in the yard of her parents’ home in Hiram, taking the first steps on a path that would eventually see her become the only Portage County native to serve as the nation’s First Lady.
By that time, despite a rocky road that included a series of affairs on the part of her husband (which he confessed to and regretted), the Garfields’ marriage had become a love story, a union blessed with seven children. “We no longer love because we ought to, but because we do,” James wrote his wife in 1867.
The future first lady had strong ties to Portage County, as did her husband, who lived in Hiram for many years, eventually becoming president of the Hiram Eclectic Institute (now Hiram College), which Zeb Rudolph helped found in 1850. He began his first venture in politics after being nominated for the Ohio Senate at the Franklin Town Hall in Kent.
The couple first met at the Geauga Academy in Chester Township, where they pursued a classical education that focused on Greek and Latin. She remembered him as “a strange genius” who looked like “an overgrown, uncombed, unwashed boy.”
They renewed acquaintances at Hiram, where Lucretia studied from 1853 to 1855. Both later taught there, James eventually heading the small Disciples of Christ college and Lucretia serving briefly as an instructor in French, Latin and algebra.
She left her parents’ home to become an instructor in Ravenna at a private school located in the Gretzinger Block on South Chestnut Street. The site later became the location of the Ravenna Theatre and was near another site with a presidential connection: a tannery once operated by Jesse Grant, father of Ulysses S. Grant.
Her stay there was relatively brief. She thought marriage to Garfield was imminent and quit her job. When that didn’t materialize, she took a job in Cleveland, then settled in Bryan, in northwestern Ohio, where she taught art. She left to marry Garfield.
Their initial years of marriage were challenging. Garfield was frequently absent from home; the couple were together only 20 weeks of the first five years of their marriage. His political career brought new demands, and his enlistment in the Union Army brought renewed separation during the Civil War. They lost two children, their eldest, Elizabeth, and youngest, Edward. Both died when they were toddlers and are buried in the Rudolph family plot at Fairview Cemetery in Hiram.
They moved to Washington, D.C., in 1869 while Garfield was serving in Congress. In 1880, he emerged as the Republicans’ dark-horse nominee for president. Crete was scrubbing the floor of their home, wearing a bonnet, when she learned her husband had been chosen, according to the National First Ladies’ Library and Historic Site.
Garfield conducted his campaign for president from his home in Mentor, and his wife played a modest role in his campaign. He won by a narrow margin and was inaugurated as president on March 4, 1881. The fact that the new president, after taking his oath, first kissed his mother, Eliza, then his wife, did not go unnoticed.
Garfield’s term as president would be a brief one. He was shot in July 1881 by a deranged office seeker, then lingered until September 19, 1881, when he died. His death was hastened, if not caused, by poor sanitation methods on the part of his attending physicians. Many historians believe he could have been saved by modern medicine.
Lucretia had been stricken with malaria shortly before the shooting and nearly lost her own life. She attempted to intervene in her husband’s care by approving installation of a crude air cooling device near his sickbed, but to no avail.
The onetime Ravenna schoolteacher outlived her husband by nearly 40 years. She was 85 years old when she died in 1918 in Pasadena, Calif. Her passing was virtually ignored by newspapers in Portage County.
This is the first in a series of Women’s History Month columns dealing with noteworthy Portage County women. This article includes information and photos from the James A. Garfield National Historic Site administered by the National Park Service.
