PRESIDENTIAL SUITE
NO HISTORICAL markers can be found on the circa-1840, red-brick house in Middletown, Md., where 23rd Ohio lieutenant colonel and future U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes recovered from his South Mountain battlefield wounds. And, according to the residence’s longtime current owners, few people inquire with them about its Civil War significance.
“Several years ago, a man from West Virginia came and took some pictures of the place,” said 86-year-old Donald Shank, who has lived in the small, unassuming house at 504 West Main Street with his wife, Lois, since they were married in 1960. “But that’s about it.”
In 2016, visitors from the Hayes Presidential Library—including some of the former Union officer’s descendants—visited Middletown, where they posed on the steps of the wartime Zion Lutheran Church with near-life-sized, cardboard cutouts of Rutherford and Lucy Hayes. The group viewed
