09/01/2026
Hardscrabble: The House That Grant Built!
The fall of 2026 marks the 170th anniversary of the Grants living at Hardscrabble.
A home is a very personal place, and most of us adapt and decorate so that it reflects what is important to us. Ulysses wanted to make a home for his wife and family that was truly their own. Cutting and dressing the logs himself, the home was completed in the fall of 1856 on a parcel given to the Grants as a wedding gift by her father on the White Haven estate.
Accustomed to the relative finery of her upbringing at White Haven, Julia lamented Ulysses’ decision to build a log cabin, not even “a neat frame house.” In fact, she recalled in her memoirs that it was “so crude and homely I did not like it at all, but I did not say so. I got out all my pretty covers, baskets, books, etc., and tried to make it look home like and comfortable, but this was hard to do. The little house looked so unattractive that we facetiously decided to call it Hardscrabble.”
Even though Hardscrabble was the first house that Ulysses S. Grant ever owned, they lived there for only a short time. Julia remembered moving in during September 1856 and living there only three months. At the request of Colonel Dent, Julia and Ulysses returned to White Haven when her mother died in January 1857. The little cabin never again served as home for the Grants.
The home still exists and is located very near the park. Stop by the park’s museum beginning in October for a small exhibit commemorating the one house that Ulysses S. Grant would ever build.
Image: Hardscrabble c. late 1860s (MO Historical Society)
