In June of 2026 I was able to visit the mansion of our fifteenth president, James Buchanan, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. This is about an hour and a half from Gettysburg, so you may want to add it on when you visit that battlefield. It is at 1120 Marietta Avenue in Lancaster, Pa. The house is known as The Wheatland.
The Wheatland was built in 1828 and James Buchanan, then Secretary of State, purchased it in 1848. He lived there until his death in 1868. During the Depression, a group of private citizens bought the house from a subsequent owner so that they could preserve it. There are ten surrounding acres from Buchanan’s estate that are preserved. Many of the household goods in the mansion belonged to Buchanan and his niece.
Next to the house is the Lancaster History Center, a modern museum which offers a limited number of exhibits on local history. Go down to the basement and you will a large number of items in the museum’s collection that are not on display. These include Civil War items. Lancaster History owns Wheatlands and just opened the Stevens and Smith Center in downtown Lancaster devoted to Thaddeus Stevens. So they display two houses of people who hated each other. Wheatland’s is open 10AM to 3PM, Monday to Saturday.
When I went in 2026, the price for admission was $20 Adult, $18 Senior, $10 Student, and free if 10 or under. If you want to tour the house, it is best to make your ticket purchase before you arrive. Typically only a dozen people are allowed on each tour and you may have to wait until a later tour is available. If you get there early, you can tour the museum for a half hour or so.
Before you go on the tour, you will be invited into an orientation film on James Buchanan. It is professionally done and uses reenactors to tell the story of the president’s life. The film is 24 minutes long, and it does give a balanced view of James Buchanan. It does not shy away from Buchanan’s support for slavery in the South, his support for allowing slavery to spread into the Western territories, and his improper influence on the Supreme Court during its deliberation on the Dred Scott case. There are also references to Buchanan’s long-rumored homosexuality.
After we finished watching the movie, a guide met us at the theater door and took us out into the museum to look at Buchanan’s carriage. Then we moved out a main door past several outbuildings, and then down to Wheatland.
We went down the path to the nearly 200 year old mansion. You could see why Buchanan was attracted to it. Buchanan was born to an immigrant family of Ulster-Scots Protestants in a log cabin in Pennsylvania during the presidency of George Washington. Soon thereafter the family moved to Mercersburg, Pa. and his father became very wealthy. Buchanan was among the up and coming young men of Mercersburg. He went to Dickinson College and later moved to Lancaster to study law in a law office.
We were brought to the house where a costumed docent met us. He was extremely well informed about the lives of the people who lived in the house as well as the architecture.
The front hall.
Throughout the house there are several paintings of Buchanan and his niece who functioned as his first lady.
The first room we went into was the dining nook where some of Buchanan’s and his niece’s China was displayed.
Buchanan became a Freemason as a young man and he like to have other Masons join him in his home. He also hosted dinners for his political colleagues.
The China was owned by Buchanan and a sizeable collection of almost two hundred year old China is displayed. Much of it was purchased when he was minister to England.
James Buchanan seemed to collect a fair number of portraits of himself.
In his parlor (living room) is displayed a drawing of the room while Buchanan lived there.
This room was used for Buchanan’s hosting of politicians from around the country..
After Buchanan was elected, he used the four months before he took office to receive men looking for work with the new administration.
A piano for entertainment. Buchanan purchased this late in life in 1865. It was played by his niece Harriet Lane. One the wall to the right are sketches of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The drawings were presented to Harriet Lane in 1860 when Queen Victoria made a Royal Tour of America.
The fireplace was modernized in 1850. Because fireplaces allowed in a great deal of cold air, Buchanan installed a coal furnace in the basement and converted the fireplace into a vent to release warm air from the furnace.
The desk of James Buchanan. It is teak wood and was given by a donor from India. When Buchanan was president, he used this desk at the White House.
During the Secession Winter of 1861, President Buchanan made no effective effort to counteract the growing secessionist fever in the South. He did not provide for the adequate defenses of Federal forts and property in the region and he saw that the only chance to avoid war was the Crittenden Compromise, which would have enshrined protection of slavery in the Constitution. Northern senators and Congressmen rejected the Compromise because it would place defense of slavery in the Constitution, making it a permanent part of American life.
Buchanan was also critical of General Winfield Scott’s attempt to prevent Southern forces from acting to stop Lincoln’s inauguration, writing:
“This was to resist an attempt which he apprehended would be made by an armed force to prevent the inauguration of President Lincoln and to seize the public property. The General was so firmly convinced of the reality of this plot, that nothing could shake his faith. It was in vain that a committee of the House of Representatives, after hearing the General himself, and after full investigation, had reported that his apprehensions were unfounded.” [ Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion]
We went into Buchanan’s library, an important tool for a lawyer.
In 1857, two days after Buchanan was inaugurated, the Supreme Court issued its decision in the Dred Scott case which Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that the main question was “Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all of the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen?” He answered “We think … that they [black people] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time [of America’s founding] considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.” Dred Scott, 60 U.S. at 404–05
Buchanan wrote that this decision should have settled the question. He said “This decision, so full and explicit, established the right of the master to take his slaves into the Territories and hold them there in despite of all conflicting Congressional or Territorial legislation, until the Territories should be prepared to assume the position of States.” Buchanan deplored the reaction of the Republicans to Dred Scott; “Instead of yielding it obedience, its correctness and binding effect were instantly resisted by the Republican party. They denounced and repudiated it in every possible form from the first moment, and continued to maintain, in opposition to its express terms, that it was not only the right but the duty of Congress to abolish slavery in all the Territories.” [pp. Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion 50-51]
The Republican reaction to Dred Scott helped fan the flames of disunion in the South:
“The Southern people, who had expected that after the decision of the Supreme Court their equal rights in the Territories would be respected by the Northern Democracy, were deeply mortified and disappointed to find that a large portion of this party still persevered in assailing these rights. This exasperated them, and placed in the hands of Southern disunion agitators a powerful weapon against the Union.” [ Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion p. 55]
The first bedroom we were shown belonged to Harriet Lane, Buchanan’s orphaned niece who had been raised by him. She continued to live with him until he died. She took on the social functions of a wife. She accompanied him to Washington when he became president and she was the first person called the “First Lady.”
Lane’s mother had died when she was nine years old and her father soon followed when she was eleven. She was close to James Buchanan, her bachelor uncle, and she asked him to become her legal guardian. Buchanan educated her in Washington while he was a senator and he took her to England when he became the minister to the Court of St. James.
Lane was very popular both with the elite set in Washington and with the general public. She invited artists to the White House to increase their recognition and she held weekly dinner parties to bring warring politicians together around the dinner table.
Next we were taken into James Buchanan’s bedroom. In the photo below you can see the bed on which he died on June 1, 1868. In May of that year, he caught a cold which led to his fatal respiratory failure.
On the floor is a hat tub where the president would bathe. To the left of the tub is a commode chair.
In 1866, James Buchanan published a book, Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion [p. 13] that gave his analysis of the cause of the war.
“This anti-slavery agitation in New England was prosecuted by other and different agencies. The pulpit, the press, State Legislatures, State and county conventions, anti-slavery societies, and abolition lectures were all employed for this purpose. Prominent among them were what were called, in the language of the day, abolition petitions.
Throughout the session of 1835-6, and for several succeeding sessions, these petitions incessantly poured in to Congress. They prayed for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and in the forts, magazines, arsenals, and dockyards of the United States within the slaveholding States. They also protested against the admission of any new slaveholding State into the Union, and some of them went even so far as to petition for a dissolution of the Union itself.
These petitions were signed by hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. In them slavery was denounced as a national sin and a national disgrace. Every epithet was employed calculated to arouse the indignation of the Southern people. The* time of Congress was wasted in violent debates on the subject of slavery. In these it would he difficult to determine which of the opposing parties was guilty of the greatest excess. Whilst the South threatened disunion unless the agitation should cease, the North treated such threats with derision and defiance. It became manifest to every reflecting man that two geographical parties, the one embracing the people north and the other those south of Mason and Dixon’s line, were in rapid process of formation…”
In Buchanan book, he refers to himself as “The President.” He wrote that he appealed to Congress to pass a Constitutional Amendment to head off secession after the election of Abraham Lincoln. He said; “The President, therefore, in his annual message of 3d December, 1860, appealed to Congress to institute an amendment to the Constitution recognizing the rights of the Southern States in regard to slavery in the Territories.”
Buchanan put the blame for the conflict on the Abolitionists of the North saying; “The long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States, has at length produced its natural effects. The different sections of the Union are now arrayed against each other…”
Buchanan wrote that:
“The South might ignore the other shortcomings of its membership in the Union “these evils might have been endured by the South, without danger to the Union (as others have been), in the hope that time and reflection might apply the remedy. The immediate peril arises, not so much from these causes, as from the fact that the incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question throughout the North, for the last quarter of a century, has at length produced its malign influence on the slaves, and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar. This feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehensions of servile insurrections. Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and her children before the morning. Should this apprehension of domestic danger, whether real or imaginary, extend and intensify itself until it shall pervade the masses of the Southern people, then disunion will become inevitable.”
Below is Miss Hetty’s room. She was Buchanan’s housekeeper. She was crucial to the family because she supervised the other servants in the house.
A place to pray.
Below is where the servants performed their work. The food was cooked in the basement and then came upstairs on a dumb waiter.
The are several outbuildings like this combination ice house and smoke house.
The plaque designated this as a National Historic Landmark.
Some other views of the grounds.
The back of the mansion.
The front entrance to the mansion.
In the 1850s, most men running for president did not campaign in person. The candidate would run a “front porch campaign” where he would meet with leaders at his home to get their support and to make sure they were campaigning for him. Here is Buchanan’s front porch.
The grand entrance to the house gives an overwhelming tribute to the man inside, even though he was an ineffective president.
The back of the mansion is less imposing, but also more welcoming.
While Buchanan was widely rumored to be homosexual, he did ask Anne Caroline Coleman to be his wife when he was in his late 20s. She refused him, and she died shortly afterwards at her sister’s house.
Buchanan did have an extended relationship with William R. King. The two bachelors lived together in Washington. King was a member of the House of Representatives from North Carolina and was later chosen to be a Senator from Alabama. He was also elected Vice President, but he died 45 days after taking the oath of office.
Lancaster History has preserved the presidential outhouse with five seats in this room. Next door is a more private outhouse with three more seats. Why did Buchanan feel the need for eight people to be using the outhouse at the same time?
Here is the outside view of the outhouse.
Another view of the same necessary.
One of my great fears was that the site would present an overly sanitized version of Buchanan’s life. The house tour did do that, but when coupled with the film, there was a balanced presentation.
When I went, it took me a half hour to tour the museum, a half hour to watch the film, an hour to tour the mansion, and a half hour to see the outbuildings. So, I spent two and a half hours there.
After I left Wheatland, I went for lunch at the Lyndon City Line Diner at 1370 Manheim Pike in Lancaster. I come from the Land of Diners on Long Island, N.Y. and I can tell you the value at this diner is very good. Having grown up eating in Greek diners, I was surprised to see one owned by an Irish family with some St. Patrick’s Day decorations even though I visited in June!
I am almost seventy years old and I had no problem on the tour. Someone with sharp mobility issues may not want to go here because visiting the house, the main attraction, involves walking up and down a large number of steps.
Note: All color photos of buildings in this post were taken by Patrick Young except as noted.
