Before Trump, America’s first president elected to two non-consecutive terms grew up in Fayetteville

With his election victory this week, Donald Trump did something that had only happened once before in American history.

He will be the second president to serve two non-consecutive terms.

Trump joins Grover Cleveland, Chief Executive 22 and 24, who served from 1885 to 1889, lost the election in 1888, and then returned to the White House for a second term from 1893 to 1897.

Before being elected commander in chief, Cleveland served as mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York.

But before that, Cleveland grew up as a boy here in central New York. His formative years were spent in a house that still stands today at 109 Academy Street in the village of Fayetteville.

In fact, the three-bedroom house, built in 1841, is currently for sale for $1.5 million.

It was in that house that Cleveland perhaps got his first idea of ​​becoming a future president.

When he was nine years old and studying at the old Fayetteville Academy across the street, Cleveland turned in an essay on the subject of “Time.”

He wrote:

“Time is divided into seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and centuries. If we expect to become great and good people and to be respected and appreciated by our friends, we must improve our time when we are young. A large number of our great men were poor and had few means of education, but by improving their time, while young and in school, they acquired their high reputation.”

Using George Washington and Andrew Jackson as examples, the young Cleveland wrote that “if we would become great and useful in the world, we must improve our time in school.”

Stephen Grover Cleveland was born in New Jersey in 1837. His father was a Presbyterian minister who moved his family to Fayetteville in 1841.

In another school essay, young Cleveland described his childhood hometown as follows:

“Fayetteville is a very pleasant village, although quite small. People have started making improvements and I think it will be a year of improvements.”

He was a good student.

After his death in 1908, The Post-Standard interviewed one of his friends, Platt Smith, who noted that Cleveland “was always quite brilliant and good at his job.”

Outside of school, he swam and fished in Limestone Creek and Green Lake, and according to Smith and local legend, he was something of a joker with his friends.

“The boys were all funny,” Smith said, “and they were always favorites with the rest of the school.”

He told of a Fourth of July prank in which Cleveland and others painted a horse in stars and stripes, put it on the roof of a store and left it tied up with a bundle of hay to eat.

“The first thing the villagers saw when they got up the next morning was this old nag, decorated for the Fourth on top of the store,” Smith recalled. “Of course everyone wondered how it got there, but no one found out.”

Another time, the future president and his buddies snuck an energetic bull calf into the basement of their school. When the director heard the racket the cow was making, “the animal hit him across the room.”

According to his good friend FG Tibbitts, Cleveland loved the pranks.

“He would control his features perfectly until his victims turned their backs,” according to an 1887 article in the Syracuse Standard. “Then he would swell, puff out his cheeks, and snort and chuckle, as if the stupidity of the other was intense. funny.”

Not so funny was the time his gang climbed the lightning rod at the Fayetteville school late one night to ring the bell and wake everyone up.

When they were caught, they slid down. Cleveland ended up impaling his leg on the metal and hanging there.

“His companions succeeded in freeing Grover, who suffered great pain as a result, and all fell to the ground together, just in time to flee from the indignant administrators,” said the Syracuse Herald in 1908. “In a nearby stream they were washed away . Grover’s wound.’

In 1851 the Cleveland family moved to Clinton, NY

Cleveland would return to Fayetteville in 1852 and work in John McVicar’s grocery store. He slept upstairs, with his friend Tibbitts, in a small room above the shop.

“Sometimes in the winter it would freeze pretty bad,” Tibbitts said. “There was no heater in the room. Rats walked through the walls and often peered at us from holes in the plaster.”

From these humble beginnings, Cleveland would move to Buffalo in 1855 and begin an internship at a city law firm. In 1859 he was admitted to the New York bar.

In 1863 he served as assistant attorney general of Erie County, after which he was elected county sheriff in 1870.

His meteoric rise ended in the White House in 1885.

Cleveland never forgets where he came from.

On July 17, 1887, he returned to his parents’ home, accompanied by his wife, Frances Folsom, whom he had married the year before.

In a short speech, he joked about remembering “Green Lake and the fish I tried to catch and never caught… and that I think are there today.”

He ended his speech with this:

“Fayetteville and those days so many years ago are the strongest and most pleasant memories that my memory dwells on. I brought you and the village of Fayetteville. You are part of this administration. I promise to fulfill my duties to win the approval of the people of Fayetteville, my oldest and dearest friends.”