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 land…