19. Rutherford Hayes
The second of seven Ohio-born presidents, Rutherford B. Hayes was born on October 4, 1822, in Delaware, Ohio. His parents, Rutherford and Sophia Birchard Hayes, had emigrated from Vermont in 1817, and Hayes’s father operated a farm and whiskey distillery. Ten weeks before Hayes’s birth, however, his father died of typhus, and Sophia was left to raise her children with the help of her younger brother. Hayes grew up on the farm and attended a local school before enrolling in a Methodist academy in Norwalk, Ohio, and a subsequent preparatory school in Middletown, Connecticut. Hayes’s birthplace, a two-story brick farmhouse, no longer exists, and the locale is designated by an unassuming marker on a busy street in front of a gas station.
-Andrew B. Leiter
The Hayes site is one of the most striking with respect to change. The original structure and farm have long ago been lost to the city of Delaware, Ohio. a small marker stands in front of a BP station to mark the approximate spot where Hayes was born. My first visit to the site was almost a total failure as far as making pictures. It was a dreary, rainy day and the long exposures I tried just didn't work out. I returned a year or so later on a crisp winter afternoon and improved my first foray. My favorite from the site is the shadow of old-style streetlights falling onto the blacktop parking lot surrounding the gas station. The impression of car tires brings the present day into the image while the shadows reference the past. Somewhere underneath the concrete, cars, and pavement is the ground walked by the Hayes family during the ups and downs of their turbulant life.
--Matthew Albritton