Ruffin Tyler, the President's grandson, born sixty-six years after his President-grandfather's death, was—and is—a marvelous purveyor of tall tales on a peninsula replete with them. (To illustrate such Tidewater propensities, let me simply note that on the very morning of the day we visited Sherwood Forest, Carol and I had toured William Henry Harrison's boyhood home, Berkeley Plantation, just ten miles or so from Sherwood. The tour guide there had suggested to his credulous listeners that a cannon ball lodged in the brickwork chimney had been shot there by a Confederate cavalry unit during the Civil War—this at the time when the entire Union army had been billeted on the grounds of Berkeley. Were we to believe this? "You'll hear a lot of silliness down here," we were quietly assured by a more forthright gift shop worker).
But Sherwood Forest, we were certain, would be different, if only because our "docent" would be an actual Tyler descendent, the youngest grandson of the tenth President. Here would be living history. In this we were not to be disappointed, for we would find Harrison full of engaging tales, but few presidential homes we have ever visited have been more devoid of insights into presidential life than Sherwood Forest plantation. Like the famous man/myth Robin Hood, Virginia's Sherwood was such a hodgepodge of credible history and fanciful tall tales that one quickly realized there would be no way to disentangle fact from fiction. All we were left with by the close of our visit were the stories told by their rather florid raconteur, but what stories they were!
We were welcomed by Mr. Tyler into the entry hall of Sherwood (after we had paid our $35 per person admission fee!), along with one other couple, and right from the start, we found ourselves entranced by the mellifluous voice of our octogenarian host.
"Good day, it's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Harrison Tyler," our host intoned in a soft, fluid, and cultivated Virginia accent that bespoke a heritage of gracious privilege. "Welcome to Sherwood."
We stood grouped together in the spacious front hallway which ran straight through to the rear of the home while Mr. Tyler spoke about a variety of paintings on display there. "This," he pointed to a portrait hanging on the wall," was my grandfather's first wife, Letitia. And this," he continued, gesturing to another portrait, "was my grandmother, Julia. My grandfather was widowed while serving as President, but his remarriage is a captivating story." Indeed it was, though it was a tale I had already known about from a variety of historical sources. Yet hearing it told from Harrison Tyler's perspective, even this initially grisly account took on a softer, much more genuinely romantic flavor. The tale involved the firing of a cannon, the barrel of which had burst, killing Julia's father. When she had seen her father's body, Julia had fainted literally into the waiting arms of President Tyler.
"He held her gently, gently," Harrison continued in his softest, most soothing voice, "and when she recovered the first face she saw was my grandfather's, gazing at her with tender affection."
How much of this had actually happened exactly as Harrison Tyler had narrated, none of us could say. Nevertheless, in a relatively short time after the tragic incident, President Tyler and Julia Gardiner had married and the nation had a new First Lady living in the White House. As Harrison led Carol and me, together with the other tourist couple, through the rooms in the central portion of the house, the anecdotes kept coming in a seemingly endless flow.
Story after story, tale after tale, issued from Harrison Tyler, some memorable, others too intimately involved with a line of family feuds and relations to be easily recalled, but none were dull. One that I especially remember involved a suitor-adversary of Harrison's who had, through a variety of means too complex to relate here, tried to steal a particularly beautiful girl from Harrison and had also laid claim to a set of presidential china rightfully belonging to the Tyler family. This rival had been a pilot, and one day by chance, Harrison noted, "his plane went up, and then went down." He added, after an appropriate pause, "and that was the end of him."
The girl in question, it turned out, had ultimately become Harrison's wife, and the china had been recovered by the Tyler family at an estate auction. "So you see," Harrison concluded, "in the end I got both the girl and the china." At this point he opened the door of a copious armoire to display the retrieved dishware.
Leading us back across the front hall, Mr. Tyler brought us into the parlor for more stories and, it turned out, a special treat. "I'm somewhat tired from a tennis match I had this morning," he noted. "Would you all mind if we just sat here in the parlor to talk?"
Before we had any chance to respond, Harrison was taking down the rope which cordoned off the precious furniture and objects of the room from normal tourist traffic, and we were being invited to sit on the museum quality settees and chairs on display there. But, I reminded myself, who better to do this than the man whose home this was?
The tales kept coming now. We learned about Julia's experiences during the Civil War (John Tyler had died in 1862) and how she had delicately kept hold of Sherwood Forest plantation by calling on the aid of Union generals as an ex-First Lady rather than as the widow of a rebel slave-owning Virginian. Harrison also reenacted in his inimitable way how the household slaves had saved the home from conflagration. Many of their newly freed slaves, Harrison explained, had remained at the plantation even after Julia had returned to the safety of her family estate in New York during the war. These servants had picked up burning pieces of wood that the retreating Union soldiers had thrown into the front hall and had rushed to the back door to throw them away from the house. (Harrison would later point out on the hall floor the clear evidence of charred floorboards to substantiate his story.)
When Julia had returned to Virginia after the conclusion of the war, Harrison told us, she had continued to live at Sherwood and had then happily paid for the labor of those who once had been her slaves (here he showed us her actual account book, indicating each worker's terms of employment). He also rather gleefully confirmed, when questioned, that the Tyler family were descendants of John Rolfe and Pocahontas, and, as we got up to view the Grey Room (complete with its resident ghost) and the parlor President Tyler had had specially constructed for Julia as a venue in which to dance the Virginia reel, our heads were positively swimming with the tales told by our incomparable host.
After about an hour and a half, Carol and I thanked Harrison Tyler for his fascinating tour, and we went back outside to take a few photographs and familiarize ourselves with the outlying buildings of the estate.
But even more importantly, it gave us the chance to try to assess everything we had been hearing for the last hour or so.
"All this is almost hard to believe," I found myself thinking, "yet his memories are so clear and detailed that it's equally hard to call them into question." Upon further research after I returned home, I found evidence of the probability of the Rolfe/Pocahontas connection to the Tyler family. Perhaps all the stories were just as real as their narrator.
Sherwood Forest was the perfect name for this beautiful place for, like the more famous original in medieval England, this Virginia Sherwood had housed an almost mythic man of firsts, and the tales surrounding both him and his descendants simultaneously defied and inflamed the imagination. The stories we had been told seemed as tall and long as the home itself, yet those one hundred yards of white clapboard siding were undeniably real. We could see them before our eyes and photograph them with our cameras. If we had reached out our hands, we could have touched them. Although we had gained few new historical perspectives here at Sherwood, our visit had been an experience never to be forgotten: a delightful party replete with fascinating narratives, hosted by the grandson of a President.
James K. Polk: “Who is James K. Polk?”
