John Tyler's House

A Correspondent of the Boston Transcript, who has recently visited Hampton, writes as follows:

John Tyler’s house stands across the river or creek from Hampton, and thus escaped the conflagration which in a night turned that beautiful town into a ruin of blackened walls.  The house is showy, and of tasteful architecture, beautifully located in the suburbs of Hampton, once surrounded with trees, flowers, and shrubbery “that Shenstone might have envied,” with marble chimney pieces, stuccoed walls, the light furniture, transferred to the quarters of Federal officers, but the heavy furniture, bedsteads, clothes, presses &c., remaining; and every room, from the attic to the basement swarming with darkies!

I could not count them, but there must have been over a hundred in the house – comfortable, tidy, and how happy!  In one rooms I found four generations in the corner of the spacious fireplace sat the great grandmother, “sans eyes, sans teeth, sans every thing,” but just life enough to rock the great grand-daughter she held in her arms, while the two intermediate generations were busy about the farming work.

“Tippecanoe,

And Tyler too.”

What a history in twenty-one years! Presi[dent, exile, dead among strangers; and the victims of his tyranny enjoying his goods, chattels, and estates.]

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, March 1, 1862, p. 3.  The article located at the bottom of the page was cut off during microfilming and/or digitization the text within the brackets comes from The National Republican, Washington, D.C., Monday, March 10, 1862, p. 2