Island's Harrisonville Named for National Forest Founder
A Look at History
BY FRANK STRAUS

In this article, we conclude the forgotten love story of Benjamin and Carrie Scott Harrison.

In the early 1890s, Benjamin Harrison's presidency became increasingly unhappy. The President had hoped to run a stable administration, with wide latitude given to the needs of railroads and fast-growing industrial corporations. Unfortunately, many of these corporations' ultimate needs and goals could not be reconciled, and the result of trying to satisfy all of them was a swamp of governmental corruption and infighting.

The crowning blow came in April 1892, as Harrison prepared to run for reelection. The First Lady, who had become increasingly enfeebled, began to struggle for breath. The diagnosis was tuberculosis, one of the leading causes of death in the late 1800s.

Tuberculosis, or TB, is a bacterial infection of the lungs. It is contagious, and its prognosis is worsened by exposure to particulate polluted urban air. As Carrie Harrison and other leading citizens wired their homes for electricity in the 1880s, the burning of coal increased in Washington. By the 1890s, American cities had become death-traps for people with tuberculosis. Physicians advised Mrs. Harrison to leave the White House and take up residence at Loon Lake, New York, in a final effort to throw off the infection.

The fight against tuberculosis was retarded by the failure of late-1800s doctors to understand the cause of the disease and their inability to offer real treatments for it. It was known that patients had to go to places with relatively clean air. The battle against TB was a major hidden factor in creating support in the U.S. for the fledgling environmental movement. Up until the time of the Civil War, no one had imagined using tax money to open large public parks in non-urban areas. Mackinac National Park, created in 1875, was the first such park authorized east of the Mississippi River. Meanwhile the diagnosis count of tuberculosis patients swelled alarmingly, and leading physicians, especially in New York City, began advising their patients to go to the Adirondacks.

The Adirondacks, in the 1890s, were one of the last industry-free, factory-free zones on the Eastern seaboard. The legislature of New York passed a law in 1892, which is still in effect to this day, to preserve the Adirondacks to be "forever kept as wild forest lands," never to be "taken by any corporation, public or private . . . ." It was to these mountains that the First Lady, Carrie Harrison, turned in July of that year in a last forlorn attempt to regain her respiratory functions.

Harrisonville, the residential village on Cadotte Avenue on Mackinac Island is named in honor of U.S. President Benjamin Harrison and his wife, Carrie. (Photographs courtesy of the President Benjamin Harrison Home)

In the previous month, June, former president Grover Cleveland had been nominated by the Democrats to fight once again for the White House. Republican party bosses asked Carrie's husband, Benjamin, to run for reelection. The President agreed, but said that his first priority would be to attend the bedside of his ailing wife. Harrison made it clear that he could not travel, make speeches, or attend party conclaves or conventions while his wife was struggling for her life.

The party leaders agreed to these terms. On August 6, 1892, Benjamin Harrison, the President of the United States, joined a physician and a trained nurse in full-time attendance at his wife's Loon Lake bedside. The 1892 presidential campaign continued without one of the principal candidates.

However, even in the clear air of the Adirondacks, and even with the best medical care (such as it was) then available for tuberculosis, Carrie's gasps for breath grew more labored.

The Republican staffers penciled in, then erased, plans for a series of speeches by the President. Harrison, given brief spells of down-time by his fellow caregivers, wrote a sixthousand word letter to the American people, a legal brief in favor of his re-election.

The voters ignored it.

The summer of 1892 ended. In mid-September, the Loon Lake sickroom was broken up when Carrie's illness was pronounced terminal. She was 59 years old. The First Lady asked to get back to the White House to die. Reporters watched on September 21, 1892, as she was carried into the Executive Mansion for the last time. Benjamin walked alongside her stretcher. He was weeping.

Benjamin Harrison never wrote his memoirs. As far as is known, he never told anyone what it felt like to be President of the United States, to have his political future hanging in the balance, and to be watching his wife on her deathbed.

On October 12, the First Daughter, Mary Harrison McKee, wrote to her husband: "I so deeply regret Father's inability to help at this time, for if he were able to . . . make some speeches it would be . . . just as it was four years ago. . . . Father would not think of leaving Mother now for anything."

On October 25, 1892, Carrie Scott Harrison died. The President was now free to campaign, but there were now only 14 days left until the election. It was too late.

On November 8, Cleveland defeated Harrison by 380,000 votes. The widower packed his and Carrie's bags, returned to Indianapolis, and after a period of mourning, resumed the private practice of law.

As the election of 1896 approached, Republican party leaders once again asked Benjamin Harrison to consider running for the office from which he had been expelled four years earlier. His response:

"There has never been an hour since I left the White House that I have felt a wish to return to it."

Three and a half years after Carrie Harrison's death, in April 1896, the former President again stood at the altar. This time his bride was Carrie's niece, Mary Dimmick. Ten and one-half months after their marriage, Mary gave birth to the new couple's only child.

In March 1901, Benjamin Harrison died. During his postpresidency years, he had once again been recognized, as he had been prior to his election, as one of the leading lawyers in the United States. However, his presidency slipped downward into the history books, and after a few more decades it was almost completely forgotten.

For the reasons made clear above, President Harrison had been forcibly educated as to the necessity of the environmental protection of the territory of the fast-growing United States. He had taken office as the friend of CEOs and large industries, and at first had tried to do their bidding. There was nothing in a factory, however, that could have helped Carrie. During his final months in office, Benjamin quietly signed a series of executive orders that set aside large swaths of Western mountain land as "forest reserves." For example, on February 20, 1893, 12 days before leaving office, Harrison ordered the set-aside of the new Grand Canyon forest reserve, Arizona, and the new Pacific Coast forest reserve, Washington.

The lands set aside by these executive orders included the territories that would later become the Grand Canyon and Olympic National Parks.

Still more national parks signed into existence by Harrison include Kings Canyon, Sequoia, and Yosemite National Parks.

Other Harrison "forest reserves," after further work by President Theodore Roosevelt, became the core of today's National Forest system.

Millions of people from all over the world each year visit the national parks and forests set aside by Benjamin Harrison in his final months of office. Harrison's business "friends," however, did not appreciate his work and saw no reason why it should be remembered. After his death, Harrison's memory began to fade into obscurity.

Back in the 1880s, lawyer Harrison had helped the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroads to join hands. In 1887, the railroads had worked together to build and open Mackinac Island's Grand Hotel.

The new hotel had increased the need for labor on Mackinac Island, both seasonal and yeararound. At the same time, many of the Islanders who had previously lived on the Island's "Borough lot," the ground below the Grand where the Island's schoolhouse and play-yard stand today, were evicted, and needed a new place to live.

In order to increase living space, in the late 1880s Islanders redeveloped much of the northern end of the David Mitchell farm as a new village in the center of Mackinac Island. Many of Grand Hotel's workers live there to this day.

The village is called "Harrisonville," in honor of Benjamin and Carrie Harrison and the nation's national forests.

Although none of Mackinac Island is in a national forest, everyone who visits Mackinac sees one. Across the harbor from Mackinac Island lies Round Island, part of the Hiawatha National Forest. Many of the trees that grow on its shoreline are white cedars, which are green all year around. Sentimentalists may choose to believe that this island is forever green in honor of the man who so loved his wife that, for her, he gave up the chance to remain President of the United States.