[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 87 (Friday, June 18, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1338-E1339]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




A TRIBUTE TO THE HISTORIC ANDERSON COTTAGE--SUMMER WHITE HOUSE TO THREE 
                               PRESIDENTS

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                       HON. ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON

                      of the district of columbia

                    in the house of representatives

                         Friday, June 18, 1999

  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, on the grounds of the U.S. Soldiers' and 
Airmen's Home (USSAH) in Northwest Washington, D.C., sits one of our 
country's most historic buildings, the Anderson Cottage. Rarely visited 
and virtually unknown, it was the summer White House of three U.S. 
presidents: Chester Arthur, Rutherford B. Hayes,and, most notably, 
Abraham Lincoln. President Lincoln spent a quarter of his presidency 
living at the Soldiers' Home and it was in Anderson Cottage where he 
wrote the last draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.
  The building is in need of restoration, and the USSAH has been 
working with the National Trust for Historic Preservation to find 
funding to restore the building and open it up as an historic site. 
Anderson Cottage also is listed as one of the First Lady's ``Save 
America's Treasures'' sites. The following article illustrates the 
importance of this home, as well as the equally historic Soldiers' and 
Airmen's Home on which it sits.

              [From the Washington Times, March 18, 1999]

              Living Link to Lincoln Hidden in Plain Sight

                         (By Catherine Watson)

       I went to Washington recently to look for links to one of 
     the country's heroes. I wanted to explore the city that 
     Abraham Lincoln knew, the Washington of the Civil War.
       Because I had only a few days, I thought I should choose 
     the big names. But the highlight was a place I had never 
     heard of--one of the least-visited of Lincoln sites and 
     arguably the most important: Anderson Cottage. (See? I didn't 
     think you had heard of it.)
       The cottage lies off North Capitol Street, on the grounds 
     of what Lincoln knew as the Soldiers' Home, now the U.S. 
     Soldiers' and Airmen's Home, a handsome, 320-acre campus on 
     high ground in the Northwest quadrant of the city. About 
     1,100 retired enlisted personnel live there, veterans from 
     World War II through Vietnam.
       I parked near the house, walked up the wooden porch steps 
     and entered a large room that would be familiar instantly to 
     anyone who knows military posts. There was that same smell of 
     governmental dust, the same kind of linoleum alternating with 
     Veterans Affairs gray paint on the floor, even the same 
     sickly pale green on some of the walls. I liked it.
       But there didn't seem to be much to see. Just how important 
     is it historically?
       Very, said Kerri Childress, public affairs director for the 
     home, whose office is in Anderson Cottage. This is where 
     Lincoln finished the Emancipation Proclamation.
       Ms. Childress, a tall, slim woman with bright blond, short-
     cropped hair, has a contagious enthusiasm for the Soldiers' 
     Home, its residents and Anderson Cottage.
       ``This really is a well-kept secret,'' she said. ``Even the 
     Lincoln buffs are sometimes surprised.''
       More surprising is how rarely it's visited: At most, 100 
     tourists a year find their way to the cottage.
       ``If this building were any place else, it would be a 
     national shrine,'' Ms. Childress said. ``We make such a big 
     deal out of Ford's Theater. Nothing happened there except 
     that he died. This was where he lived. This was where he 
     created. This was where he became Abraham Lincoln.''
       Like many presidents, Lincoln had a summer White House, 
     though I had never associated that plain man with such a 
     luxury. This was it--a getaway that may have been the only 
     place in Washington where he and his family had a semblance 
     of normal life or anything approaching happiness.
       It's still fresh and countrylike, but now the Soldiers' 
     Home is an island awash in city

[[Page E1339]]

     streets. During Lincoln's summers, it was well outside of 
     smelly, muddy, crowded, insect-ridden Washington--a genuine 
     country estate built for a local banker in 1840.
       The government purchased the property in 1850 to create one 
     of the nation's first homes for veterans. The cottage was 
     renamed at the start of the Civil War to honor Maj. Robert 
     Anderson, the Union Commander of Fort Sumter, the bastion off 
     the South Carolina coast where the first official shots were 
     fired.
       Anderson Cottage was the first infirmary at the Soldiers' 
     Home, the first guest house and, in 1954, the first dormitory 
     for female veterans, Ms. Childress said.
       The gray-stucco cottage also served as summer White House 
     for presidents Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur. 
     President James Buchanan had his summer residence across the 
     street.
       But it's the Lincoln connection that matters most.
       ``Secretary of War Edwin Stanton did not want Lincoln up 
     here,'' Ms. Childress said. ``He felt they could not protect 
     him out here.'' Stanton probably was right.
       From late June to early November, starting in 1862, Lincoln 
     commuted virtually daily by horseback between the cottage and 
     the White House, accompanied by 20 to 30 cavalrymen with 
     their swords drawn. He didn't much care for the escort.
       Even so, Ms. Childress said, one night he arrived at the 
     cottage without his stovepipe hat. It had been shot off his 
     head.
       Anderson Cottage also is where John Wilkes Booth's first 
     plot against the president was supposed to have been carried 
     out. It was a kidnapping plan that later was abandoned in 
     favor of a bullet.
       There, too, Mary Todd Lincoln held seances, trying to 
     connect with the spirit of her son, Willie, who had died in 
     the White House just three months before the Lincolns first 
     came to Anderson Cottage.
       This also is where Mrs. Lincoln spent two months 
     recuperating from an 1863 carriage accident. Some historians 
     believe the carriage had been tampered with in an attempt on 
     Lincoln's life, Ms. Childress said.
       Mrs. Lincoln refused to be taken to the White House after 
     the accident. ``There was an open-door policy at the White 
     House'' during the war, Ms. Childress said. ``I can only 
     imagine the chaos.''
       Besides, ``Mrs. Lincoln wasn't set up to be a politician's 
     wife, especially a president's wife. What comforted her was 
     this place.''
       At Anderson Cottage, ``Lincoln did not entertain and did as 
     little business as possible,'' Ms. Childress said. ``There is 
     very little doubt in my mind that some of Lincoln's greatest 
     thoughts and greatest writings took place in this house. This 
     is the only place he would have had the solace and the 
     quietude to do that.''
       As the afternoon deepened into the winter twilight, Ms. 
     Childress walked me across the drive to an ancient copper 
     beech, a gigantic tree with a knobby trunk and a ring of low 
     branches touching the ground. Where each touched, a young 
     tree had sprung up.
       ``In summer,'' Ms. Childress said, ``it is like a big 
     canopy.''
       Lincoln took refuge in there, she said. When aides couldn't 
     find him anywhere else, they would look for him under the 
     swooping branches, where he often went to read.
       Sometimes he even played there. He climbed this tree a 
     couple of times, she noted--once with his son Tad, another 
     time with Stanton's children.
       I was awed. This tree knew Abe Lincoln--it's one of the few 
     living things in this world that did.
       Back inside, I saw that the cottage was bigger than it 
     looked--it's a ``cottage'' only if you compare it with a 
     mansion such as the White House. The style is Gothic revival, 
     and it still has its lacy white trim, big front porch and 
     heavy interior moldings.
       Except for modern furniture and a few partitions, the 
     layout of the house is about the way it was when the Lincolns 
     knew it. The White marble mantelpieces are original. So is 
     the simple wooden banister leading up the stairs from the 
     entry hall. And the shutters folded into the window frames. 
     And the sliding pocket doors on the ground floor--painted 
     shut now, but still there.
       I wandered upstairs on my own and easily found the large 
     second-floor room at the front of the house that had been 
     Lincoln's bedfront. This was where he wrote the final draft 
     of the Emancipation Proclamation.
       The room is sparely furnished--a Victorian dresser, a 
     contemporary dining-room table ringed with modern chairs. But 
     its appeal lies in its silence, not its furniture. It was 
     dead quiet there the day I visited--genuinely peaceful. The 
     only sound from outside was a plaintive bugle call as 
     veterans lowered the flag for the day.
       I could imagine the tall, gaunt president leaning against 
     the fireplace mantel or looking out the windows at the green 
     lawn that still surrounds the cottage. He probably even 
     looked through the same panes of glass.
       It hit me then: This place has more to do with Lincoln the 
     president than any other shrine. More than his well-preserved 
     home in Springfield, ILL. More than the frontier hamlet of 
     New Salem, ILL. More than the White House itself.
       Here he was not only commander in chief, but also husband, 
     father and human being. No wonder he would take risks to ride 
     out here every chance he got.
       The house is structurally sound--always has been and always 
     will be, Ms. Childress said: ``We will always take care of 
     it.'' It's not restored, so it's not pretty, but it could be.
       Unfortunately, the Soldiers' Home doesn't have the money to 
     do it. The home has been funded from its beginning by small 
     deductions from enlisted men's pay--now 50 cents a month, 
     plus any fines and forfeitures from disciplinary actions. It 
     has never been supported by taxpayer dollars.
       But with the downsizing of the military, less money is 
     coming in because there are fewer soldiers to fund the 
     deductions. The effect has been ``devastating,'' Ms. 
     Childress said, ``just devastating.''
       A rescuer may be coming, however. The United States 
     Soldiers' and Airmen's Home is negotiating with the National 
     Trust for Historic Preservation to have the trust take care 
     of the cottage.
       Rather than having it become just another Victorian house 
     with antique furniture. Ms. Childress said she hopes it can 
     be used as a learning center for an array of related topics: 
     the Civil War, the effects of the Emancipation Proclamation, 
     Lincoln himself. But all that, she said, is still a long way 
     off.

     

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