Jacob Wohlschlaeger’s store ledger helped establish when White Haven turned green. The National Park Service’s history of the house traces purchases of the necessary paint chemicals to May and June 1874, during Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency and the Grant family’s ownership of the property.[1]
The written record was not the only evidence. Paint sampling also confirmed the historic color. Some original paint remains visible inside the mud room on the back porch; the park’s frequently asked questions point visitors to that surviving patch.[2]
Where is this place?
White Haven, Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site. This map locates the town or region, not a verified exact historic event site.
“White Haven” was an older name, borrowed by the Dent family in 1820 from another family property in Maryland. It did not describe the house’s original finish. When the Grants lived there in the 1850s, the exterior was cream or light beige. Medium gray followed around 1860, before the Paris Green repainting of 1874.[1]
White paint arrived in 1940, under Albert and Delbert Wenzlick. It remained for about fifty years. During restoration in the 1990s, the National Park Service chose the bright green associated with the Grant family’s ownership, rather than keeping the white exterior its first employees had encountered.[1]
