Spiegel Grove was purchased in 1845 by Rutherford B. Hayes’s uncle Sardis Birehard, who named it for the reflecting pools of water that collect after a rainfall, using the German word for mirror. Birehard completed the residence in 1863, and the Hayes family first used it as a summer retreat before it became their home three years before Hayes was elected President. Additions between 1873 and 1880 enlarged the house to its present size, and four generations lived there before it opened to the public in 1956. The first Presidential library and museum, opened in 1916, houses artifacts, documents, and books about the family and the Gilded Age. A granite monument from the President’s ancestral home in Vermont rests over the graves of Rutherford and Lucy Hayes on their favorite knoll in Spiegel Grove. The Hayes Presidential Center, a private non-profit corporation, manages Spiegel Grove, the Library and Museum, the residence, and other properties. President Hayes also asked distinguished guests to place their hands on trees that were then named after them, and some of those trees are now more than 200 years old. White House gates, a gift from the United States in 1928, stand at the six entrances to Spiegel Grove, honoring Presidents and military heroes. The natural footpath around the Sandusky River rapids was once part of an Indian Trail from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River; early French explorers, missionaries, and Daniel Boone used it, and it later became General William Henry Harrison’s supply route during the War of 1812. In 1790, Cherokee Indians bound the captive Peggy Fleming to a tree there, and the Wyandot chief Tarhe the Crane rescued her from being burned at the stake.