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Editor’s Note: This year marks the Bicentennial, 2024-2025, of Lafayette and his farewell tour, “Guest of the Nation”, which took place August 15, 1824-September 7, 1825. To commemorate the occasion, the LaGrange Daily News will be publishing a series of columns by Richard Ingram, a longtime resident of LaGrange and Chair of Friends of Lafayette.

Week of May 26 – June 2, 1825

The Farewell Tour

Lafayette arrived at Uniontown, the seat of Fayette County which was created in 1783 and named in his honor.  A parade came to its end at a festooned pavilion where Albert Gallatin, a favorite son locally, gave, by accounts, a long speech extolling Lafayette’s virtue.

Gallatin was born in Geneva, Switzerland, spoke French as first language.  He was inspired by the ideals of the American Revolution and immigrated to Pennsylvania.  He became our longest serving Secretary of the Treasury under Thomas Jefferson (1801-1814); our Ambassador to France, succeeding Georgia’s William H. Crawford, and during which time Lafayette came to know him well; and he would become Minister to England (1826-1827).  During the raucous 1824 presidential election he was William Crawford’s running mate.  Gallatin is buried in Trinity Church Cemetery, Manhattan, along with Alexander Hamilton, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, and Robert Fulton.

A banquet and speeches followed at Mr. Walker’s Spotsylvania House, where Lafayette spent the night.

At 6 AM Lafayette, Gallatin, and a cavalry escort rode fifteen miles to “Friendship Hill,” Gallatin’s stone mansion “set high on the rocky banks of the Monongahela.”  Rows of tables had been set up in the garden for a reception of one thousand people.  “Mr. Gallatin’s best liquors were strewn in profusion on the tables.”

Next day, Gallatin escorted Lafayette back to Uniontown by way of New Geneva, which Gallatin founded in 1797.  Back in Uniontown, “more ladies, more roses, more wreaths,” and another night at Spotsylvania House.

The next day Lafayette arrived at the Brick Meeting House in the Forks of Yough at 10 AM where he was greeted with a thirteen-gun salute by the Pittsburgh Arrangements Committee.  After harnessing fresh horses for the carriage and a stop at Beazel’s Tavern for refreshments, he travelled through Perryopolis to Walker’s Hotel at Elizabethtown.  No parade, since it was a Sunday, but Lafayette did meet-and-greet, including Louis Bollman, a Pittsburgh merchant and brother of Eric Bollman, the physician accomplice in the failed escape attempt from Olmutz.  That afternoon he floated a barge with four oarsmen down the Monongahela to Braddock’s Field, arriving at sunset.

Major General Edward Braddock was sixty years old in 1755, commander-in-chief of the British Army in North America, charged with subduing French and Indian forces at Fort Duquesne, present day Pittsburgh.  George Washington was a colonel in the Virginia militia and aide-de-camp to Braddock.  On July 9, 1755, Braddock led a contingent across the Monongahela River where he was surprised, shocked might be the better word, to find himself in a crossfire, the French and Indians having rapidly deployed from Fort Duquesne onto his flanks.  When he ordered adjustments accordingly, the enemy shocked him again with their rapid response.  Braddock learned, too late, that the British were not invincible; he was shot through the chest, carried off the field by Washington and Col. Nicholas Meriwether.  His last words were, “Who would have thought?”  Before he died on July 13, he gave his battlefield sash to Washington who carried it with him the rest of his life; it is on display today at Mount Vernon.

Lafayette spent the night says Jane Bacon MacIntire “at the large and elegant home of Judge George Wallace, which stood on the battlefield, a tract of 328 acres.”  The welcoming committee from Pittsburgh held a reception there that evening.

On May 30th Lafayette proceeded though Lawrenceville to the Allegheny Arsenal where he received a 24-gun salute and had breakfast with the Commandant Major Churchill.  Down the turnpike toward Pittsburgh, past large crowds all along the way, onto Thirty-third Street, past Hunter’s Tavern, and onto Ball’s Field for a reception and review of troops commanded by General Wilkins.  His carriage drawn by four white horses deposited Lafayette at Darlington’s Hotel, a two-story building also known as the Mansion House, at the corner of Fifth and Wood Streets.  Nine Revolutionary War veterans were there to greet him, including Galbreath Wilson who had been nearby at the Battle of Brandywine when Lafayette was wounded, in 1777.  Lafayette had dinner with dignitaries at Ramsay’s Hotel before returning to Darlington’s for the night.  His room faced Wood Street; his bed a mahogany four poster with an eagle on the canopy, each post inscribed with a Revolutionary War general’s name—Wayne, Mercer, Lincoln, Greene—and decorated with silk streamers with “Washington” and “Lafayette’ printed on them.

The “Allegheny Democrat” voiced a lone dismal diatribe, but on the same line as the Governor of Missouri.  It decried “the gross infatuation” with Lafayette, and like the governor misapprehended what Lafayette was all about.  The editorial also, curiously, accused Lafayette of “being the man who deserted Napoleon in the hour of need.”  Where are the fact-checkers when needed?

Lafayette departed Pittsburgh the morning of June 1st and arrived at Butler for lunch at Mechling’s Inn; on to Mercer where he arrived at 1 AM and spent the night at Hackney House.

BY 1 PM on June 2nd he was at Meadville for lunch at Samuel Torbett’s Hotel, and that afternoon a visit to Allegheny College, the alma Mater for luminaries William McKinley, Ida Tarbell, and Clarence Darrow.

He left Meadville at 3 PM; reached Waterford that evening in time for a banquet followed by rest at Read’s Hotel.