Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site

Ulysses S. Grant first came to White Haven in 1843, a lieutenant fresh from West Point posted to Jefferson Barracks, invited by his roommate Frederick Dent, and met Dent's sister Julia here. From 1854 to 1859, after he resigned from the army, the Grants lived on the farm with her parents. They were never its only household. Julia's father, Frederick F. Dent, held thirty people in slavery in 1850 and seven in 1860, and most of them lived in log cabins behind the house, on a site still unlocated.

The park names them where it can. Mary Robinson, born around 1827, grew up as Julia's playmate and became the cook who fed the Dents, the Grants and the people in the quarters from the summer kitchen. After Grant died in 1885 she gave the St. Louis Republican a long interview about him, though the reporter cut out her own life. William Jones was bought by Grant from his father-in-law. On March 29, 1859, Grant went to the courthouse in St. Louis and wrote out Jones's manumission instead of selling him for $1,000 or more. The park calls Jones the last enslaved person owned by a U.S. president. Several of White Haven's enslaved people ran away during the war, around 1864.

The house, begun in the 1810s and painted the Paris Green it wore in the 1870s, stayed a private home for most of the twentieth century. A local campaign saved it from development in the 1980s, and Congress authorized the site in 1989.