HistoricSiteMarkers
Early RepublicCivil War

U.S. Grant Birthplace

Monroe Township, Clermont County, Ohio

Marker Inscription

Hiram Ulysses Grant was born in this one-story, timber-frame home on April 27, 1822 to Jesse and Hannah Simpson Grant. The Grants settled in Point Pleasant the previous year, and Jesse took charge of the tannery located near the cottage.

Erected by Ohio History Connection

The Story

In a modest one-story timber cottage in the Clermont County hamlet of Point Pleasant, the future general and eighteenth president of the United States entered the world in the spring of 1822, the first child of a tanner and his wife who had settled along the Ohio River only a year before. Named Hiram Ulysses at birth, the boy would grow up around his father's tannery trade before a clerical error at West Point permanently rechristened him with the initials that history remembers. The Ohio frontier of these years was a rising country of river commerce and small industry, and this humble house marks the starting point of one of the most consequential American lives of the nineteenth century.

Why it matters

This unassuming cottage is the birthplace of the Union commander who accepted Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox and later served two terms as president, making it a quiet origin point for the story of how the Civil War was won and the nation preserved.

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Related people

  • · Ulysses S. Grant
  • · Jesse Root Grant
  • · Hannah Simpson Grant

Themes & tags

Civil WarIndustry & InventionPresidential SitesHome

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