There at the Founding

There at the Founding opened on January 22 at the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site, 1230 North Delaware Street in Indianapolis. It's part of the site's programming for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and it spends its time tracing three generations of the Harrison family who left their mark on American governance.

The first is Benjamin Harrison V, a Virginia delegate to the First Continental Congress who was chosen to read Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence and went on to be one of its 56 signers. Then comes his son, William Henry Harrison, the 9th president, who fought at Tippecanoe and Fort Meigs, served eleven years as territorial governor of Indiana, and died one month into his term in 1841. Finally, there's his grandson, Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president, a lawyer and Brigadier General who argued fifteen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. The exhibit pulls these three together to show how one family operated across the early decades of the country.

It's built around rarely displayed objects from the site's collection, mixed with interactive displays and text panels. Among the artifacts are the Bible Benjamin Harrison used at his 1889 inauguration and a 1782 handwritten land deed signed by Harrison V. The display lets you see the actual documents and items these men handled, rather than just reading about them in a textbook. It's a look at the family's role in the American political system, told through the things they left behind.