Dead Presidents

Chris White is touring the gravesites, birthplaces and homes of the U.S. presidents. Here are his notes from those visits, which he probably means to be funny. Eh.

9: William Henry Harrison

Berkeley Plantation, Charles City County, Virginia; Harrison's tomb, North Bend, Ohio

You.See. Berkeley (November 1, 2009)

You know the First Thanksgiving: weatherbeaten Pilgrims sit down with generous Indians, and two vastly different peoples share the fruits of their labor and let celebration bridge the vast gaps between them.

WRONG!

America's REAL First Thanksgiving took place before the pilgrims even landed. On December 4, 1619, not far upriver from Virginia's Jamestown, John Woodleaf led ashore two score settlers from the good ship Margaret. They knelt to the ground and gave their thanks to divine providence. There were no Indians; there were no buckle hats. Per their charter they would celebrate that landing each year, in the settlment at the modern-day site of Berkeley Plantation.

It was a glorious and poignant tradition that survived all the way to 1622, when they sort of had to stop because Indians massacred about a third of the white people in Virginia. The moral here is that a little pumpkin pie goes a long way toward making Indians happy.

Still, even if Massachusetts got it right, Virginia got it first. And any true history buff knows that FIRST IS WHAT MATTERS! Berkeley celebrates the Original Thanksgiving with a festival the first Sunday of every November, and I was able to use that awesome pretext to trick some friends into visiting the birthplace of ... wait for it ...

WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON! See, you thought this was about Thanksgiving, but I turned it into a president thing. You'd think you'd learn.

But first we gotta talk about this festival. When I say "festival," you're thinking big, right? Maybe some kind of food pavilion? Maybe someone on a horse? Maybe kids carrying balloons, and local artistes trying to sell ugly homemade jewelry at an endless series of booths, and clowns painting faces?

Well you could not be more wrong. A festival is 30 people sitting in folding chairs under a tent in the rain, watching the following program:

  • Some kind of choral thing.
  • A "re-enactment" of the original Thanksgiving landing, minus any kind of boat. Now, if you just got off an (invisible) boat carrying 40 people after two months, you'd be pretty excited, right? You might hump a tree, or at the very least convey unbridled joy through your voice, right? Nope! I now know from the reenactment that the first thing you do when you land is take attendance, then stand in a line talking in a monotone until the guy in the minister hat tells you to kneel. I'll say this: those guys kneeled in the mud, in period costumes that are probably dry-clean only. That's love.
  • A speech from a retired Virgina state senator. I liked this guy.
  • A guy playing "Taps" while hidden behind a bush (more on this in a minute). Why was he behind a bush? I'm not exactly sure. Maybe the acoustics were better, or the guy was really ugly. I just don't know. The bush was blocking my view.
  • A raffle drawing.
  • Indian dancing. I wasn't paying too much attention at this point, so I did sort of miss how the "friendship dance" fit into the storyline of Indians killing so many people that the settlement had to be abandoned. But I am generally pro-friendship.

They had more planned at some point. Mike of the James River Black Powder Club not only gave us a fine demonstration on period weaponry, he also gave us the straight dope: the rain had sent a few people packing. Crowds were light thanks to a steady downpour for most of the morning, so some of the other "living history" stuff was shut down once the media was gone. Given the chance to make my own rag doll, or perform an amputation without administering anesthesia, I might have had a blast; as it was, I had a fine time, but I don't think I'd plot a return visit until the 400th anniversary in 2019. That party is going to be OFF THE CHAIN. Really, they're going to have the blacksmithing demonstrators make a chain, then take the party off it.

There's so much more to Berkeley than festivals, though! It's one of the oldest estates in America, and as such, everything interesting in United States history happend there first. Such as:

Taps. Dan Butterfield wrote "Taps" while at Berkeley during the Civil War (McClellan camped the Union army there around 1862). The tune, meant as a sorrowful expression of what a huge sissy McClellan was, has survived through the decades. As a former Boy Scout bugler, I can testify that this song is so mournfully powerful, that merely playing it will have many a grown man shout: "Dave, why is your damn kid playing the ****ing bugle at 7 in the morning?"

Bourbon. The first bourbon whiskey in America was made at Berkeley.

There you have it. The two most important firsts in U.S. history, at Berkeley.

And let's not forget the Harrisons, who turned that godforsaken hellhole into a thriving center of commerce. Benjamin IV built the fine mansion, and Benjamin V (buried on site!) manned up as a public servant and signer of the Declaration of Independence. William Henry, who spent a great deal of his life avenging the massacre of 1622, was born in the mansion, probably in an upstairs room. He left Virginia at a young age for the raw, wild sensuality of Ohio and Indiana, but the house (restored in the 20th century to its 1700s appearance) still has some nice tokens from his life, like a paisley shawl. You might say, "how could a military hero wear a paisley shawl in public?" And you'd be right to say it, because Harrison didn't. With a little less pride, he might have bundled up in 1841 and not died.

According to our guide, WHH might have actually been at Berkeley to compose the Inauguration Day speech that famously killed him. But I'm not going to list that as a fact, because our guide was terrible. He admitted he hadn't given the tour in a few months, he completely blanked out on about six occasions (in a FOUR ROOM TOUR), and then gave up in every instance with: "Oh well. Any questions?" I did have questions, but I'm not too confident the answers we got. The guide mentioned that the home had brick walls three feet thick. When I asked why, he said "protection from Indians." You know, Indians, with their heavy artillery. Did I mention this was a $10 tour?

Still, the house is nice if unspectacular. It was visited by every president 1 through 10, not to mention Lincoln. And it's rare these days to find a plantation tour that is willing to completely ignore slavery. I particularly enjoyed the portrait of young William hanging downstairs. He was movie-star handsome in his early years, and the portrait showed him in the uniform of a Lt. Major General. The problem is, he wasn't that rank until a much later age. Apparently he did not like sitting for portraits, so when he refused to do so later in life, they got the painter to Photoshop an older portrait. He slapped the fancier uniform right on top of the old one. Heh.

Then on the way home we ate at Cracker Barrel. History is awesome.

Harrison's Tomb (September 19, 2006)

The bold educational initiative known as the White History Project teaches us more about the great men and women who shaped this nation, through history's greatest medium: short home-made videos. If anyone wants to subsidize this amazing cultural effort, please call me ASAP. I'm not above taking grant money, since I do these things for the children.

This video on William Henry Harrison was inspired by a visit to Harrison's gravesite in North Bend, Ohio.

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