It was his custom at Mentor to rise very early in the morning; directly after breakfast he would mount one of his horses and go all over the farm, giving directions for the day's work. There were one hundred and twenty acres in the original farm, but forty more were purchased soon after. The beautiful lawn, together with the garden and orchard, takes up about twelve acres. Seventy more are under cultivation, and the remainder are in pasture lots and woodland. One piece of marshy ground has been carefully drained, and from it an excellent crop of wheat is obtained. Many other improvements have been made, as Garfield was an enthusiast in scientific farming. He liked nothing better than to show visitors over the place; and, in making the rounds, he would always take them down the lane back of the house, and up to the top of the ridge beyond, explaining how the level basin below was once a part of Lake Erie.
The little town of Mentor is largely settled by New Englanders, and the hilly surface, the groves of maple, oak, and hickory, interspersed with thrifty farms, remind one constantly of the Eastern States. Cleveland is only twenty-five miles to the east, and the waters of Lake Erie form its northern boundary. To reach Mentor by rail, one must take the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad.
A gentleman, who dined one day at Lawnfield, says,—
"I sat next to Mrs. Garfield, and I found her a ready and charming conversationalist.... She is tall, fine-looking, has a kind, good face, and the gentlest of manners. A pair of black eyes and a mouth about which there plays a sweetly-bewitching smile, are the most attractive features of a thoroughly expressive face. She is a quick observer, and an intelligent listener."
The two older boys, Harry and James, are fine, manly fellows, eighteen and sixteen years of age. They are good scholars, and passed an excellent examination upon their entrance to Williams College in the fall of '81. Mollie, the only daughter, is a lovely girl of fourteen. The next child, a boy of ten, bears the name of Irvin McDowell.
"I had," said Garfield, "a personal acquaintance with General McDowell, and I knew him to be an upright man and a good officer, and consequently protested slightly to the abuse heaped upon him by giving my son his name."
The youngest child is seven years of age, and is called Abram, for his grandfather.
"Grandma Garfield," whose features, as well as those of the children and their parents, have become so familiar to us, is a bright, active old lady of eighty years.
"I have seen Garfield," writes Mr. Campbell, the editor of the Wheeling Intelligencer, "in the midst of his plain home life—beneath his Western Reserve cottage farm-house. His surroundings were those of a man of culture, but of a man of limited means. His board was frugally spread—scarcely differing in any respect from the table of his humble neighbors. He preferred frugality and self-denial to debt, and I came away, doing honor in my mind to this sterling trait of his character."
Some of the happiest hours of Garfield's life were spent in this modest home at Mentor, and as one writer beautifully expresses it, through those long, long summer days, "wounded to death, and looking out on the yellow dreary Potomac, so dreary, so yellow in the throbbing midsummer heat, his soul wandered in his dreams, not amid the scenes of his ambitions or his achievements, but through the haunts of his boyhood, through the streets of Cleveland, with the comrades of his prime; and his last dream on earth was a dream of Mentor, the home of his happy and prosperous manhood. Its modest walls, its harvest fields, its peaceful glades, were the last pictures to fill his sight with delight before he lifted his eyes to confront the glory of the Heavenly City."