Mount McGregor developed as a resort after Duncan McGregor built a road and a small hotel there in the 1870s. Investors recognized the site’s potential and built a railroad line from Saratoga Springs in 1882, and in 1884 the luxurious Hotel Balmoral opened, drawing guests with promises of “No Dew, No Malaria, No Mosquitoes, Certain Relief from Hay Fever.” As many as seven trains a day traveled to and from the mountain. The Balmoral housed Ulysses S. Grant’s friends and visitors, as well as reporters who kept constant vigil on him. In the summer of 1885, while trying to complete his memoirs and dying of throat cancer, Grant left the heat and humidity of New York City after his doctors recommended it and accepted Joseph W. Drexel’s offer to use his cottage on Mount McGregor, arriving on June 16. Before coming there, Grant had begun writing his memoirs, and his friend Samuel Clemens, known as Mark Twain, agreed to publish them through Charles L. Webster and Co. in hopes that public demand would provide financial security for Grant’s wife Julia. Ulysses S. Grant, eighteenth president of the United States and commanding general of the Union Army during the Civil War, died on the morning of July 23, 1885, just days after completing his Personal Memoirs. After the hotel burned in 1897 and the railroad was dismantled in 1899, the cottage and the outlook were preserved first by the Grand Army of the Republic and then by New York State, and today the Friends of Ulysses S. Grant Cottage manage the site in cooperation with New York State agencies.