White Haven in Grantwood Village, Missouri, preserves the home of Julia Dent Grant and a landscape central to Ulysses S. Grant’s early adult life. Once part of an 850-acre plantation purchased by Frederick Dent in 1820, the estate was sustained by enslaved labor, with 18 people held there by the 1850s. After leaving the army in 1854, Grant lived at White Haven with Julia and their children while farming the property and struggling financially until 1859. The site is significant both for its connection to Grant’s path to Union general and president and for what it reveals about slavery in border-state Missouri, including Grant’s 1859 manumission of William Jones.

Affton, Missouri · USA