Collection The First Ladies
Biographies & Portraits
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Creator: John Chester Buttre, 1883.
During the Civil War, Eliza McCardle Johnson was thrown out of her home in east Tennessee and forced to find shelter elsewhere. The strain of the war left Mrs. Johnson weak, and so her daughter, Martha Johnson Patterson, served as White House hostess. As hostess, Mrs. Patterson found portraits of John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Millard Fillmore, and Franklin Pierce in an attic. She had them framed and hung in the White House, a tradition still practiced in the mansion today.
Biographies & Portraits
Biographies & Portraits
Animals, whether pampered household pets, working livestock, birds, squirrels, or strays, have long been a major part of White House...
From its construction in 1792, until the 1902 renovation that shaped the modern identity and functions of the interior of the White...
"I knew he'd be acquitted; I knew it," declared Eliza Johnson when told how the Senate had voted in her...
With the assassination of Lincoln, the presidency fell upon an old-fashioned southern Democrat of pronounced states' rights views. Although an...
For half a century she was the most important woman in the social circles of America. To this day she...
Christened Claudia Alta Taylor when she was born in near Karnack, Texas, in 1912, she received her nickname as a small...
In the summer of 1864, Kentuckian John Bullock called upon President Abraham Lincoln at the White House to make a personal...
On March 4, 1809, at Washington’s first inaugural ball, one keen local observer recorded that the new first lady, Dolley Payne To...
From its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, the historic preservation movement in the United States...
The only true response to art is to look with an eye like that of a child: unprejudiced, unbiased, clear,...