Walk in Benjamin Harrison’s Footsteps for Gilded Age Glam

The 23rd president’s house museum in Indianapolis combines history and peak preservation.

B enjamin Harrison, anyone? He was our 23rd president, well known to few, a mere name to most, probably unknown to those younger than, say, 40 if they went to a union-run school where American history isn’t taught save for the doings of Sacajawea, Harriet Tubman, Norma Rae, and their many oppressors among the patriarchy.

The story of Harrison (1833–1901) as told at the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site — and he was a consequential president — isn’t just his own. It’s the story of his Victorian house and its preservation. It’s a piece of the Gilded Age. Then there’s Harrison’s grandfather, William Henry Harrison, Old Tippecanoe, president for one month in 1841, and a Whig god. Harrison’s great-grandfather, Benjamin Harrison V, signed the Declaration of Independence along with four other Harrison kin. So there’s a story to tell for America’s 250th as well. It’s an essential Indiana visit.

Harrison’s three-story, 16-room, scrupulously, wonderfully restored house is open to the public. He and his family lived there from 1875 to his death, except for the four years when he was president, 1889 to 1893. The house is in the Old Northside, a historic district not far from Indiana’s capitol and once a primo place to live. Now it’s smack up against I-65 and, though I’m told the hood has been gentrified, it’s seen better days. Booth Tarkington’s Magnificent Ambersons, published in 1919, is set in a fictionalized Indianapolis in a neighborhood — in reality, Woodruff Place — not far from Harrison’s home on North Delaware Street. The advent of the car and suburb put both on the road to dilapidation.

The house we see today is the 1895 iteration after Harrison added front and rear porches, a grand pantry, and an extra bathroom. Standing outside, I thought it was Italianate on the cusp of mix-and-match Queen Anne. Cornices have brackets so fancy that they look like icing on a wedding cake, but the front porch is Federal Revival with Ionic columns and touches like the Eastlake plate surrounding the front doorknob. The front-door window is etched glass, and above the door is an ornate stone hood molding. At 380,000 bricks, it’s a genuine Victorian pile.

The Harrison house is 80 percent original, and there are no cases like those we’d find in museums. We want that. We don’t want historic houses to look encased beyond recognition by plexiglass. So the docent is security — please, don’t touch — as well as teacher and historian. Tour guides at historic houses are usually volunteers, well trained and passionate about the cause. Our guide was a museum-education graduate student at Butler University in Indianapolis. He was a natural and knowledgeable about big things and tidbits, too.

Take the front parlor. The hallway is grand, with a winding staircase, red wallpaper, a parquet floor, oak and walnut, and a lamp that looks like a streetlight soaring from the newel post at the foot of the main stairs. The room has the original palace-sized carpeting, what we’d consider to be an ornate grand piano, a lithe Tiffany Studios glass perfume sprinkler with a peacock feather base and a neck that resembles a swan. Cobalt-blue, silk-upholstered chairs — they’re Eastlake Juniper Crest designs — have the look of authority. There’s a red velvet sofa, too. The room’s variegated but comfortable.

Here in the front parlor, between the opened pocket doors leading to the back parlor, Harrison formally accepted the Republican presidential nomination in 1888. Harrison might have been 5 foot 4 and our second-shortest president — Madison gets the Ultimo Wee One prize — but he was a powerful, persuasive speaker. Our guide told us that James Garfield might have pioneered the “front porch” style of presidential campaigning — the candidate delivering speeches from his own home and receiving delegations there as well — but Harrison perfected it. Until Garfield, presidential candidates mostly kept mum, sending surrogates on the hustings. It’s thought that 350,000 people visited the North Delaware Street house to hear Harrison tout high tariffs and negotiate reciprocal rates between nations, Civil War pensions, statehood for Western territories, and every other issue that could inspire a delegation committed enough to go to Indianapolis.

Harrison waved the bloody shirt, reminding voters that the Democratic Party was by nature the party of violence. An enduring truth. On Election Night, he bested Grover Cleveland, winning the Electoral College, 233 to 168, but losing the popular vote by about 100,000. Harrison is still the only Hoosier president.

Harrison’s library was his favorite room. It’s his man cave, with his 3,000 books, wallpaper, plush Persian rug, and commodious desk, but it’s his president cave, too. There are portraits of four generations of Harrison men going back to Harrison V. Harrison’s father was a congressman, and his grandfather a president, but he was no pampered heir. He was born an Ohioan, one of ten children, went to Miami University, and moved to Indianapolis with his wife, Caroline, a minister’s daughter, in part because Chicago and Cleveland felt too big. As a Civil War brigadier general, he led his Hoosier troops in hand-to-hand combat at the Battle of Atlanta in the city and countryside — the very terrain that Scarlett O’Hara and her beleaguered entourage, with Prissy puling all the way, trudged through, in Gone with the Wind, as they fled Atlanta for Tara.

Caroline Harrison (1832–1892) is best known for the brilliant blue and lacy dress she wears in her official White House portrait. The Harrison house owns a copy. Her hourglass Mae West figure belies her role as president of the staid Daughters of the American Revolution. She planned the construction of the house, did most of the decorating, served on boards supporting widows and orphans, loved hosting the hoards in 1888, and even liked politics. What a trooper. She also led the charge in overhauling the rat-infested, rotting, and antiquated White House. And she started the official collection of White House china and a furniture inventory so future families weren’t forced to bring their own. Hers was the first official White House Christmas tree. Under her watch, the place was electrified, though no one would touch the switches, fearing electrocution. She also bought the Resolute Desk, used by most presidents in the Oval Office.

The Harrison house is the kind of house museum I like. It’s personal, with lots of elements of a fully lived life. There’s Harrison’s unique horn chair, made of cattle horns and with a jaguar pelt seat. It was a gift from a Texas-rancher friend during Harrison’s presidency. His cigar case is labeled “The President.” There’s a hand-carved cane with little busts of the presidents, from Washington on top to Harrison on the bottom. Harrison was the Centennial president, since he started his term a hundred years after Washington started his. A German-immigrant craftsman made his massive oak bookcase.

The house was beautifully — and faithfully — restored four or five years ago after much research. In the dining room, Caroline’s 1887 coffee urn is an amalgam of Roman, Egyptian, and Gothic Revival motifs and a hefty beast of a thing. The mahogany sideboard and serving table are triumphs of bulbous form. In the back parlor, a Reginaphone made sweet music. That’s an 1890s cross between a phonograph and a music box. Our guide played a tune using a revolving metal disk.

The upstairs bedrooms have personal touches, too, without seeming ghastly or ghostly. I loved the massive ostrich-feather fan in a bronze frame on the mantel of the fireplace in the bedroom used by Mary, the Harrisons’ oldest daughter. In that era, civilized women developed a fan language made of subtle gestures. Resting it on the right cheek meant “yes,” drawing it across the cheek meant “I love you,” drawing it through the hand signified “I hate you,” and twirling it in the left hand meant “get lost.” Today, the left wing and less evolved just scream “F*** Trump,” nose ring erect and encrusted, pussy cap hot and bothered. Speaking of crazy, there’s a crazy quilt on Harrison’s bed that includes 1888 campaign ribbons among dozens of other colorful textile patches. I was happy to see one room covered with Nocturnal Owl wallpaper. It’s an 1890s pattern in one of the bedrooms at my house in Vermont.

Was Harrison’s presidency a success? As she exited the White House on March 4, 1889, Mrs. Cleveland told the White House butler not to change too much because she’d be back in four years, and back she was. “I pity a man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth starves in the process,” Harrison said, speaking in favor of tariffs. His were so high that the public rebelled against their impact on prices. Among other highs and lows were the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the admission of six new states — all Western and a one-term record — and a big expansion of the Navy. Harrison’s tries at a civil service reform fizzled. He couldn’t reconcile currency purists on the silver and gold sides, either. He tapped department-store magnate John Wanamaker as postmaster general to deliver high customer service standards to America’s mail system. Harrison also created the National Forest Reserve system that led to protecting the Grand Canyon and Yosemite.

Harrison’s five-week cross-country tour in 1891 was pioneering as a feel-good, unity-building, stealth move for his reelection campaign. He and his party traveled in five luxury Pullman cars through 20 states, and Harrison delivered 142 speeches. Though known as the most gifted orator of his age, Harrison was said to be chilly one-on-one, close to autistic, and a limp persuader. A not inconsiderable cadre of Republicans tried to dump him in 1892. James Blaine, his secretary of state, the party’s 1884 candidate, and an intriguer non pareil, might have wanted to run again. An already lackluster campaign on both sides, Cleveland battling Harrison, slowed in October as Caroline Harrison’s health, fragile for years, sank. She died, evidently from TB, on October 25. Campaigning stopped altogether. Cleveland won, 277 to 145, with a popular-vote margin of 300,000. The Populist ticket got 8 percent of the vote, a taste of what was to come. Cleveland’s second term has to be seen as a flop.

Back to North Delaware Street went Harrison, a widower and ex-president but still a lawyer. He practiced law and served as a Presbyterian elder, mostly keeping clear of politics, but he didn’t stayed a widower for long. In 1896, he married Mary Lord Dimmick, the late Caroline’s 37-year-old niece. The match was an eye-roller and eyebrow raiser, and Harrison’s adult son and daughter were less than philosophical. Mary arrived with her imposing satinwood and rosewood bedroom furniture, the bed’s frame with cartouche of Cleopatra, and chairs topped with Cleopatra or Mark Antony, her lover. Harrison and Mary’s daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1897. Harrison died in that bedroom, Cleopatra above his head. The stained glass Tiffany window that Mary commissioned in Harrison’s memory for their local church is now at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. At 348 inches wide and 168 inches tall, Angel of the Resurrection has that “you are there” look.

The second Mrs. Harrison was the central figure in the house’s preservation. Though she and young Elizabeth moved to New York eventually, Mary kept the house, renting it but keeping most of the furniture in the attic and cellar. In 1938, she transferred ownership of the house to the Arthur Jordan Foundation, an Indianapolis philanthropy involved with Butler University’s music school, with the proviso that the house be used as a Harrison museum. The upstairs floors served as housing for female music students at Butler until the 1970s, when the house was renovated and fully opened as a museum, though with many generic Victorian touches. Elizabeth Harrison became a lawyer and married James Blaine’s grand-nephew. Their daughter, Jane, married Garfield’s great-grandson.

In the early 2020s, the site raised $6.8 million to renovate the house, open the third floor as a temporary exhibition space, and enhance education programs for local schoolkids. A new park area hosts outdoor events like swearing-in ceremonies for new citizens, and it’s a drop-off point for school buses. Close to 2,000 people have sworn their citizenship oaths there. An 89-foot flagpole and handsome brick-paved path to the house are impressive.

The top floor of the house, once the ballroom, now hosts special exhibitions. Presidential Ink, which just opened the day I visited, shows part of the collection of presidential autographs assembled by Eric Holcomb, Indiana’s governor from 2017 to 2025. All 45 have a John Hancock on view. William Henry Harrison’s is his authorization of rations for Native spies while he served as General Wayne’s aide in 1793 in the Northwest Indian War. A letter signed by Herbert Hoover describes meeting Harrison at a Stanford baseball game when young Hoover, and he was indeed young once, was a student there.

And there’s an Autopen machine. I’d never seen one. Truman first used one, and now it’s a White House staple for letters getting a rote answer. No, it’s not the autopen that President Sharp-as-a-Tack’s puppeteers used to sign pardons for the liar Fauci, Biden’s crooked son and brother, murderers, swindlers, and themselves, of course. I hear that the poor thing’s in a rest home for misused and abused machines. Its gears, belts, and sprockets must’ve wrenched when it was programmed to write “President Dr. Jill Biden.” Machines might have souls after all.