Hyde Park Stories: Boulder Memorial to Ulysses S. Grant’s Tree
Written by Patricia L. Morse
In Washington Park, a boulder sits in the grass near 51st Street. The inscription, barely legible, says, “Tree Planted by Ulysses Grant, December Sixth 1879.” The nearby tree is clearly not 140 years old. What was Grant doing in what today is the middle of nowhere?
The story of the tree and its boulder begins in 1877. After leaving the White House, Grant decided to take a vacation and see the world for the first time. He planned to travel as a private tourist through Europe, Egypt, and Israel, but the trip quickly became a diplomatic journey as everyone from Pope Leo XIII to Czar Alexander II to ordinary Ottoman soldiers wanted to meet him. At the end of his planned itinerary, the U.S. Navy encouraged him to continue through Southeast Asia. When Grant carried diplomatic communications between China and Japan, the Meiji emperor of Japan thanked him with several tree planting ceremonies, including a Himalayan cedar that’s still alive at the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo. After Grant’s death, the Chinese diplomat involved in the exchange planted a gingko tree at Grant’s tomb in New York, marking the importance of Grant’s diplomacy. That too is still alive.
From Japan, Grant sailed to San Francisco and made a slow triumphant progress across the United States, greeted everywhere by immense crowds and long ceremonies, which, taking a cue from the Japanese, often included planting trees.
His stop in Chicago in November 1879 met the reunion of 80,000 veterans of the Union Army of Tennessee, men he had led through the Battles of Shiloh, Chattanooga, and Vicksburg. Hundreds of thousands lined the parade route. Even in the pouring rain, the roar of the crowds was deafening. That night, a glittering banquet at the Palmer House in his honor was capped by a speech by Mark Twain.
A month later, Grant circled back for a quiet week with his son Fred who lived in Chicago. Fred had married Bertha Honoré Palmer’s sister Ida. The Detroit Free Press pointed out that Potter Palmer had given Ida a $2000 wedding dress (worth $45,000 in 2022 dollars). She was connected to Chicago’s movers and shakers, including the South Park Commissioners—one of whom was Paul Cornell and another was the head of the Union Stock Yards, John B. Sherman. The Commission had been working on the southside boulevards and the future Washington Park, using Olmsted and Vaux’s plans and the talents of Sherman’s son-in-law Daniel Burnham and landscape architect Horace Cleveland. What better way to draw attention to their efforts than to get Grant to plant a tree? They chose a location near an elaborate new horse fountain where Payne Drive enters the park. Grant agreed to the low-key event. He was considering running for a third term, and Hyde Park was still the home of well-heeled Lincoln Republicans.
On December 6, 150 men, including the mayor, met at the Palmer House, where they boarded open carriages bedecked with bunting. They picked up Ulysses Grant at Fred’s at 781 S. Michigan Avenue and, escorted by twenty mounted park police, paraded down the boulevard to the park, where a band and several hundred uninvited people waited. The American elm of “goodly size” slanted out of the hole supported by a rope attached to a windlass.
According to the Chicago Daily Telegraph, the weather did not respect the great man. It was miserable, so the ceremony was brief. The president of the South Parks Commission said the sight of the tree planted “by the hand that carried the sword of victory” would be an inspiration. Grant replied with his standard tree-planting speech: “I hope that in my future visits to your magnificent park I may see the tree which I am now about to plant growing and flourishing, and that in its growth it may be symbolical of the growth and prosperity of your magnificent city.” Grant took the nickel-plated shovel, threw three shovels of dirt into the hole, and handed it off to the commissioners, who added their own bit of dirt. With everyone’s ceremonial shoveling done, the elm was hoisted up. The uninvited crowd and the reporter for the Chicago Tribune were disappointed to discover that the South Parks Commissioners were not providing lunch. Instead, the carriages headed back to the warmth of the Palmer House.
Memories, however, are short. In 1899, the Tribune interviewed the man who tended the park’s trees. He spun a tale that included a cast of thousands, a golden shovel, and Grant still in uniform—in 1865, before the park even existed. The Tribune mused that few remembered this event. The boulder must not have been there in 1899 to correct the story.
A 1909 Chicago Daily News photograph shows a bemused policeman studying the boulder so it might have been news because the boulder was new. With the boulder in place and a flagpole, it became a destination worthy of a postcard. Unfortunately, the South Parks Commission got the date wrong. The boulder said November 1879, the date of Grant’s triumphant parade. A disgruntled letter writer contacted the Tribune, and the commission corrected the inscription.
The elm itself in 1899 looked grand—the Tribune reporter said it was a giant and that “few of the trees among the thousands in Chicago have more reason to rear themselves in proud solitude and to lord it over lesser growths”—but the tree caretaker was worried for its welfare. He said there were two issues with the elm, which ordinarily could have lived 150 years. Elms need rich loamy soil, but the park soil is nutrient poor. The second was that the proud solitude was causing the tree to be lonely. The Tribune thought this was charmingly eccentric. But the caretaker’s knowledge of trees, unlike his knowledge of history, was spot on. Biologists now know that soil microbiota connect communities of trees and strengthen their health. In any case, the tree lived only half its normal span. Its passing sometime in the 1930s went unnoticed. The elaborate fountain and the horses that used it also faded from memory.
In 1971, when a letter writer asked the Tribune what the boulder could possibly refer to, not even the Park District had an answer. The Tribune quipped that maybe it was actually Washington planting a tree in Grant Park.
A shorter version of this story appeared in the Hyde Park Herald on March 10, 2022. Hyde Park Stories: Ulysses Grant Tree and Boulder | Local News | hpherald.com
Sources:
Grant’s lifelong history with trees: Firmly Planted — U.S. Grant Cottage National Historic Landmark
Grant’s biography, especially the world tour: Grant. Ron Chernow. Penguin Books. 2017.
Chicago Tribune, Chicago Daily Telegraph, digital archives of the Chicago Public Library and the Chicago History Museum, Library of Congress.
