Log Cabins and Cider Barrels: William Henry Harrison Memorabilia

William Henry Harrison portrait reverse painting on glass

Poor William Henry Harrison!  He had already had a very full life – participating in the vicious conflicts in the Northwest Territory before and during the War of 1812, serving as governor of the Indiana Territory, traveling to Columbia as a diplomat.  Aside from an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1836, he’d come home to Ohio, where, then in his early 60s, he was contentedly puttering around his farm.  But then the 1840 election came calling and Harrison left behind the contented provincial “log cabin” life he was mocked for during the campaign to win the election.  The campaign was a vigorous one and an early example of political spin: Harrison, born into a Virginia slaveholding family, was depicted by Van Buren as a bumptious backwoods man who wanted to sit around picking his teeth and drinking hard cider.  This failed, fueling instead the image of Harrison as a man of the people while Van Buren came off as an elitist.  The “Log Cabin” campaign resulted in log cabin imagery being plastered on everything, including whole sets of china, and anything that couldn’t easily bear the picture of a log cabin, like this inkwell, could be made in the shape of a cider barrel.

Determined to prove he hadn’t gotten soft in his old age, Harrison (pictured above in this reverse painting on glass) insisted on giving his inaugural address on a raw March day, sans coat or hat, an address that it should be noted took him two hours to read.  That did not, as is commonly thought, make him ill.  What felled him was a cold that cropped up three weeks later.  The busy first days of holding the office did not allow Harrison any rest or even any peace and quiet, and he went downhill quickly, likely not helped by all the castor oil and leeches, dying nine days after falling ill, thirty days after taking office, and 170 years ago on this April 4th.

This was the first time the country had lost a president in office and regardless of political affiliation, Americans seemed to take the death hard.  The funeral was quite an affair and Harrison was commemorated everywhere, even on schoolgirl samplers like this one.  This unique situation continues to impact the marketplace today.  Because of Harrison’s short time in office, there are few documents signed by him as president, and autograph collectors will often pay 10-20 times more for a signature from his presidency than one of the many signatures from the years before!

-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com