The Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center is a complex comprising several buildings related to the life and presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. Located in Fremont, Ohio, the center comprises the Rutherford B. Hayes Museum and Library and Spiegel Grove, an estate encompassing the Hayes home, residence to several generations of the Hayes family. Opened in 1916, the Rutherford B. Hayes Center Library was the first presidential library and one of only three for a 19th-century president. The Center is supported by the private foundations, the Ohio Historical Society and Hayes Presidential Center Inc.
The library holds the 12,000 volume personal library of Rutherford B. Hayes, as well as materials relating to his military and political career, particularly of his presidency from 1877 to 1881. It also contains 70,000 volumes plus newspapers and journals from the time of the Civil War to the eve of World War I.
The library was built by the state of Ohio in 1916, and was expanded in 1922 and in 1968. Stephen A. Hayes, the great-great grandson of President Hayes, is the President of the Board of Trustees for the Presidential Center.
The center became national news in 1996 when the Associated Press reported that a real estate company in Florida sent a computerized letter to the Hayes Center, apparently inviting the former president to buy a condominium: "Rutherford, we're excited for you!" it read. The director of the center graciously turned down the offer for the long-dead President Hayes.
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“The haughty and imperious part of a man develops rapidly on one of these lonely sugar plantations, where the owner rarely meets with anyone except his slaves and minions.”
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“Major [William] McKinley visited me. He is on a stumping tour.... I criticized the bloody-shirt course of the canvass. It seems to me to be bad “politics,” and of no use.... It is a stale issue. An increasing number of people are interested in good relations with the South.... Two ways are open to succeed in the South: 1. A division of the white voters. 2. Education of the ignorant. Bloody-shirt utterances prevent division.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
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“Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day’s demonstration. Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)