The Boyhood of Grant


Deerfield, Ohio, was not a place of any importance when Captain Noah
Grant of Bunker Hill fame arrived there from the East. Indeed, it
was not then much more than a spot on the map and it has ever won
any great renown. Yet in this tiny Ohio village there lived at one
and the same time Owen Brown, the father of John Brown, who virtually
began the Civil War, and Jesse Grant, the father of Ulysses Grant,
who practically brought it to a close.

It is certainly strange that these two men should, with all the
world to choose from, have chanced upon the same obscure little
village, but it is still stranger that one of them should have become
the employer of the other and that they should both have lived in
the very same house. Such, however, is the fact, for when Jesse
Grant first began to earn his living as a tanner, he worked for
and boarded with Owen Brown, little dreaming that his son and his
employer's son would some day shake the world.

It was not at Deerfield, however, but at Point Pleasant, Ohio,
that Jesse Grant's distinguished son was born on April 27, 1822, in
a cottage not much larger than the cabin in which Abraham Lincoln
first saw the light. Mr. and Mrs. Grant and other members of
their family differed among themselves as to what the boy should
be called, but they settled the question by each writing his or
her favorite name on a slip of paper and then depositing all the