BACKROADS • JANUARY 2022
Page 15
Frontline Eurosports presents
BIG CITY GETAWAY
daytrip ideas to get out of the daily grind
GRANT’S COTTAGE
1000 MT MCGREGOR RD, GANSEVOORT, NY 12831 518-584-4353 • WWW.GRANTCOTTAGE.ORG While we were heading up to this year’s Americade, in Lake George, New York, we came across an historic site unknown to us. How something as wonderful and significant as this had eluded us for all these years was beyond us, but on a day-trip from the rally we rode up Mount McGregor, one of the peaks of the Palmerton Range. The road wound up to the summit, passing a large complex, once an asylum and then a penitentiary, and now a giant white ghost atop the mountain. U.S. Grant Fun Fact… Ulysses wasn’t his real first name. Hiram Ulysses Grant was stuck with the name Ulysses S. Grant due to a mistake by a benefactor on his application form to West Point. And as with President Harry S. Truman, the middle initial “S” doesn’t stand for anything. But having the name “U.S.” Grant him the nickname “Sam,” as in Uncle Sam, among soldiers. Just a stone’s throw away we found what we had ridden there for - a mountain cabin that was bult by Joseph Drexel, a philanthropist and banker who also had a resort hotel, at one time, atop the mountain. Drexel was close friends with President Ulysses S. Grant. When the past president and son lost all their money to a Ponzi-style swindle and he was dying of throat cancer, Drexel offered Grant a place to recover and finish his memoirs.
Ulysses S. Grant moved to the Cottage on June 16, 1885. With the love and support of his family and his publisher Mark Twain he completed the Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant only days before his death on July 23, 1885. This superb publication of this two-volume work ensured his family’s financial security and gave the world one of the most critically acclaimed memoirs by a U.S. president or historic military figure. This autobiography is considered among the best, if not the best, written by a President. U.S. Grant Fun Fact… Grant was the youngest president elected at the time. The former general was 46 years old and never held elected office when he took office in 1869. His inexperience would be a factor in a tumultuous eight-year term amid Reconstruction.
