Visitors to the White Haven estate at Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site sometimes happen upon a curious stone building behind the historic house.  This humble little structure looks a bit out of place amid the other wooden buildings on the site, and it has undergone several transformations since it was built.  What was it used for?

National Park Service archeologists believe the stone building was probably built well before the Civil War – perhaps as early as 1840 – when Grant’s in-laws, Frederick and Ellen Dent, owned and farmed the 850-acre slave plantation.  Enslaved laborers are thought to have worked there, cooking food, sewing clothing, and cleaning laundry; and some enslaved cooks may even have lived in the attic. 

 Although the main house on the estate featured a basement kitchen, its wood construction would have been prone to catching fire during the cold winter months, so cooking duties would probably have shifted to the cooler stone kitchen during the summer. 

Yet a workplace for enslaved people wasn’t the end of the little building’s story. Sometime after slavery was abolished, a permanent kitchen was established on the first floor of the main residence and the stone building ceased to function as a summer kitchen. The roof and walls of the neglected building collapsed.

Then in the 1940s or 1950s, the private owners of White Haven expanded the west wall of the stone building, rebuilt and re-roofed it, and used it as a three-car garage. Changes to the structure included rebuilding exterior walls, removal of the wall dividing the two rooms, replacement of the gabled roof with a shed roof, and a concrete floor.

After the National Park Service acquired ownership of White Haven in 1990 (a purchase facilitated by JNPA), workers restored the stone building to its original appearance.  Archaeological digs yielded numerous broken dishes, crockery, silverware, as well as sewing equipment from the nineteenth century – further evidence of the domestic tasks enslaved laborers were performing at this site.

On your next visit to the park, be sure to pay a visit to the summer kitchen building, where you’ll find additional information about its many uses.