To this day, Ulysses S. Grant’s cocaine precipitates remain sealed in a jar in a lodge atop Mount McGregor, some ten miles northeast of Saratoga Springs. The Union general and eighteenth US president died aged sixty-three in 1885 of throat cancer, without a greenback to his name. (Pensions did not yet exist for presidents. Before Grant, most had simply come from wealth.) Grant’s doctors had advised him to stop smoking (which they hadn’t quite tied to the throat cancer) and to leave muggy New York City for mountain air. The philanthropist Joseph William Drexel lent Grant and his family and domestic servants use of his aerie, while investors active in the area—they had built a railroad to the summit and just completed a large, electrified hotel near the home—funded his move.
The cocaine was to alleviate his excruciating pain and may also have provided some pep for the completion of his memoirs, finished only three days before his passing and published soon after by Mark Twain. But the jarred dregs aren’t the only thing preserved inside the home—a national historic landmark offering tours for twelve dollars. Our guide, who turned out to be a student of horology, explained that a clock on the mantle was stopped by an attendant minutes after Grant breathed his last. A portrait of Lincoln hangs now, as then, above the deathbed, where Grant’s body lay for public viewing for weeks after. In an adjoining parlor, our helpful horologist flicked on the lights to illuminate what appeared in the dark like a mass of calcified corals: ghostly, desiccated, 140-year-old floral arrangements resembling a garden gate, a pillow, and a cross.
In the twentieth century a tuberculosis sanitarium that was constructed on Mount McGregor’s peak went through numerous institutional incarnations before assuming its final function as a prison. The now-fenced-up facility (it closed in 2014) is a ghoulish monument to unfreedom just downhill from the charming yellow cottage where Grant recollected his victorious fight to end slavery and his defeated attempts to see Reconstruction through. Perhaps it is a hopeful sign that the cottage, not the prison, survives.