How President Grover Cleveland came to find solace in the sea air of a quaint village of Bourne.

Ask any lifelong Cape Codder about Presidential presence on our scenic shores and the Kennedy name looms large, where it adorns dozens of buildings and historical sites throughout Hyannis and Hyannisport. For good reason; out of all our Executive guests, President Kennedy and his family spent the most time here. Still, Cape Cod has played host to seven other Presidents throughout U.S. History. Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant was the first, on a trip to Martha’s Vineyard in 1874. In 1907, Theodore Roosevelt sailed to Provincetown to lay the cornerstone for the Pilgrim Monument to coincide with Jamestown’s tricentennial celebration. Three years later, the Monument was dedicated by Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft. More recently, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket have been the vacation spots of choice for Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden. Aside from the Kennedy’s, however, there’s only ever been one U.S. President to truly call Cape Cod home in any sense of the word: Grover Cleveland, the 22nd (and 24th) President of the United States. 

Unlike Kennedy, Cleveland had no ties to Cape Cod or Massachusetts. He was born in New Jersey and spent much of his early life in upstate New York, obtaining a piecemeal education through apprenticeships and the like. After working his way through a clerkship with a small firm in Buffalo, Cleveland was admitted to the New York Bar at just 22 years old. He was, by all accounts, an obscure and unremarkable lawyer for the next two decades until he was elected Mayor of Buffalo...