President Monroe in the Chartiers Valley
It has been our opinion that the only visit of a sitting President to the Chartiers Valley was the trip President Ulysses S. Grant and his wife took to Washington, Pa. to visit relatives of Mrs. Grant. Recently I learned that I was grossly mistaken and that President James Monroe had indeed visited Canonsburg on September 5, 1817 and then gone on to Pittsburgh. It turns out there is a monograph by a gentleman named S. Putnam Waldo, entitled “The Tour of James Monroe, President of the United States, through the Northern and Eastern States”, which describes a remarkable trip…