Former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant has a unique and significant tie to Mississippi.
Former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant has a unique and significant tie to Mississippi that has nothing to do with Civil War battles fought on the state’s soil.
Mississippi State University houses Grant’s presidential library. Mississippi State is one of only six universities in the country to host a presidential library.
The Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library consists of a 21,000 square-foot facility that offers the largest single collection of Grant papers and items in the world, contains 15,000 linear feet of correspondence, research notes, artifacts, photographs, scrapbooks, and memorabilia, along with 4,000 published monographs.
The collection wound up at Mississippi State because of the work of a retired MSU history professor who taught there for more than 25 years and wrote extensively on the Civil War.
Visitors to our museum can enjoy a spacious gallery which includes artifacts from and interactive exhibits that introduce visitors to Grant’s life, his military achievements, his presidency, and his later life.
Anne Marshall, executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, said her predecessor, John F. Marszalek, was responsible for the library in Mississippi.
In 2009, Marszalek was the executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Association, a group tasked with relocating the collection when officials at Southern Illinois University didn’t want to house the private collection any longer, Marshall said.
Historian John Y Simon — while a professor at Southern Illinois University — started collecting Grant correspondence to garner copies of every letter Grant ever wrote or received, Marshall said.
“The correspondence was housed at Southern Illinois, but largely functioned as a private collection, only accessible with the permission and cooperation of Simon,” Marshall said.
When Simon retired, the school did not want to support the collection any longer.
Marszalek approached then incoming MSU president Mark Keenum about housing the collection at the university.
Mississippi State built a $10 million facility that was added to the 4th floor of the existing library which now houses the presidential library’s state-of-the-art Grant museum.
“We get several thousand visitors a year, from all over the nation and even different parts of the world. Visitors to our museum can enjoy a spacious gallery which includes artifacts from and interactive exhibits that introduce visitors to Grant’s life, his military achievements, his presidency, and his later life,” Marshall said.
Grant biographers, including Ron Chernow, Ronald White, and Fox News anchor Bret Baier, all utilized materials from the library. The library staff also worked closely with the production company which made a Grant miniseries that appeared on the History Channel in 2020.
Marshall said visitors love the artifacts from Grant’s life, including letters written to family members, specially commissioned China from his daughter Nellie’s White House wedding, and a copy of his death mask. Visitors also enjoy the interactive touch screen exhibits and the four life-sized models of Grant throughout his life.
In addition to the Grant library, the museum includes a gallery dedicated to the Frank and Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana, a 2017 donation that was considered the largest privately owned Abraham Lincoln collection in America. With hundreds of thousands of historical documents and items housed on-site, the new addition makes Mississippi State a leading destination for research on the Civil War and two presidents who shaped the course of American history.
Marshall said the university has received a federal appropriation to build a brand new, free standing presidential library that should be ready for visitors in two years.
For more information about the Grant library, visit www.usgrantlibrary.org.
