Written by RAP Archivist, Elaine Akin
It is widely known among those in the neighborhood who remember when the Buckland House was bequeathed to Riverside Avondale Preservation in 1990, that much of the home’s contents, the Buckland family’s material possessions, was donated to the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library in Fremont, Ohio. At first, I imagine this seems odd; however, George, Grace, Mary, and Charlotte Buckland in fact arrived in Jacksonville in 1912 from Fremont, as their roots ran deep in Ohio and the surrounding Midwest.
President Rutherford B. Hayes
Today, the Hayes Library has an entire “George Buckland” collection, thanks to RAP’s donation and the professional relationship between Fremont native Hayes and George’s father, General Ralph Pomeroy Buckland, who formed a partnership as attorneys at law in early 1846 prior to Hayes’s presidential election in 1877.
General Buckland himself was quite a well-known politician and military leader in his time. He served as mayor of Fremont from 1843 to 1845, delegate to the Whig National Convention in 1848, member of the State Senate from 1855 to 1859, Representative of Ohio in Congress from 1865 to 1869, and government director of the Union Pacific Railroad from 1877 to 1880. Prior to serving in Congress, he entered the Union Army as Colonel of the 72nd Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, in 1862, then moved up the ranks to Commissioned Brigadier General of Volunteers and Brevetted Major General by 1865.
As we continue to inventory and catalog the many boxes of correspondence in our Buckland collection, we have found some truly special treasures, such as a letter written to George Buckland by then former President Hayes in 1892 regarding General Buckland. Leading with “My Dear George,” the contents show fondness from Hayes toward a man he has likely seen grow up from a boy, and imply that he was gathering biographical details about the General upon his death that same year, likely for some sort of civic and/or military honor. The transcript reads as follows:
Vice President Charles Dawes
Revisiting George’s Ohio roots, George attended the Cincinnati Law School in the class of 1886 with Charles Gates Dawes who would eventually become the Vice-President of the United States from 1925 to 1929 under Calvin Coolidge and a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925 for his work on the Dawes Plan for World War I reparations. George Buckland and Dawes were lifelong friends, as evidenced by the camaraderie in Dawes’s correspondence to George.
A photo from August 1901 is signed “for Mr. George Buckland from his friend Charles G. Dawes,” and a letter on “The Vice President’s Chamber, Washington” letterhead reads:
Photo Credit: Riverside Hospital in 1911, 2033 Riverside Ave, Florida Times-Union Archives
President William McKinley
Eliza Huntington was the sister of Grace Buckland, George’s wife. In 1881, Eliza married then Captain Edmund Rice, who was, after a very decorated military career, appointed by President McKinley in July 1898 to be the senior colonel of all U.S. Volunteers in the Philippines.
Earlier in their marriage, Eliza was sometimes able to accompany Edmund on his stations, for example, to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair where she met famed International Aesthetic Movement artist Charles Caryl Coleman and possibly Elihu Vedder (visit our past blog post here), as well as to Puerto Rico where Eliza and then Colonel Rice are documented in The ’98 Campaign of the 6th Massachusetts, USV by Frank E. Edwards (1899):
“No history of the regiment in Porto Rico would be complete were the name of Mrs. Rice, the wife of the colonel, omitted. On the 2nd of September [1897], Colonel Rice arrived from Ponce, accompanied by Mrs. Rice… being the first English woman, so far as known, to have been in that part of the island. The day after her arrival she visited the hospital, and from that time until her departure, her entire strength and energies were given to our sick men. All the attentions possible in the power of one woman, of personal exertion and suggestion combined, were given to the hospitals. She remained her self-sacrificing devotion to the welfare of the men has endeared her name to every man who knew her in the hospitals, and has given to all a memory and respect of an American woman the mention of whose name is the signal for the doffing of the regimental hat.“
Rice retired in 1903 with the rank of Brigadier General and membership in the Medal of Honor Legion, and died in 1906 of heart disease accelerated by the harsh tropical climates in which he had served. Eliza died in 1918, and we suspect much of George and Grace Buckland’s more unique and international possessions were inherited from the well-traveled Rices. Due to Brigadier General Rice’s high rank and proximity to President McKinley, the couple were afforded diplomatic opportunities and exposure to foreign cultures, a mixture of work and play, that trickled down to the Jacksonville Bucklands in the form of special collected souvenirs, now in RAP’s collection.
