by We made a bit of a detour to go the Sherman House Museum in Lancaster, Ohio. It was the birthplace and childhood home of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) and his younger brother John Sherman (1823-1900). It turns out there wasn’t too much to it.
The home was built in 1811 and enlarged in 1816 by Judge Charles Sherman. The brick front in evidence today was not added to the house until 1870, long after the Shermans lived there. Judge Sherman and his wife had 11 children, but when he died suddenly of typhoid fever in 1829, the family was left destitute.
William Tecumseh was just nine years old when his father died, and he went to live with neighbors, the Ewings, who became his foster parents. Six-year-old John stayed in the family home with his mother before moving in with an uncle for a few years, then returning home again.
John Sherman, though a troublesome child (he was expelled for punching a teacher at one point), went on to be a very successful politician who served as Treasury Secretary under President Hayes and as Secretary of State under President McKinley.
He was also a United State Senator, helped found the Republican party, and was the namesake of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
But of course it’s William Tecumseh that makes the house save-worthy and whom the museum is primarily focused on. General Sherman served the Union Army during the American Civil War, “earning recognition for his command of military strategy but criticism for the harshness of his scorched-earth policies.” Sherman’s “March to the Sea” was a strategic move meant to cut off the southern part of the Confederacy from the more northern regions, disrupt supply lines, and generally demoralize the rebels. It was successful, but Sherman’s name is still enough to trigger some of today’s treason-denying Southerners.
After the war he served as the Commanding General of the U.S. Army until 1883. In 1875 he published his memoirs, which “became one of the best-known first-hand accounts of the Civil War”.
While there are – surprisingly – some original pieces to the family in the home, it’s primarily decorated with period-appropriate pieces. The ground floor rooms are viewed by guided tour, then there’s some exhibit rooms, a re-recreation of Sherman’s Civil War tent, and a short film on the second floor. Oddly, you hardly learn anything about the brothers in the museum, though it’s clear they are most enamored of William.
The cover photo to this post is part of the recreation of General Sherman’s Civil War field tent (right there in one of the bedrooms on the second floor). The bottom footlocker actually belonged to him.
