Best remembered as First Lady for her bachelor elder brother Grover Cleveland during the first two years of his term, Rose Elizabeth Cleveland found her official duties so tiresome that she was said to conjugate Greek verbs during White House receptions.
Cleveland worked as a school teacher, and editor of the Chicago-based magazine Literary Life. She published a volume of essays, George Eliot’s Poetry and Other Studies (1885), a book of social commentary, You and I: Or Moral, Intellectual, and Social Culture (1886), a novel, The Long Run (1886), and a translation, The Soliloquies of St. Augustine (1910). In 1910, she moved to Italy to live with her lover, a wealthy widow named Evangeline Simpson Whipple, and died there during the 1918 influenza pandemic.
The Homes
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, DC (The White House)
Built of Aquia Creek sandstone, this 130-room Neoclassical mansion was largely destroyed by arson during the War of 1812, and reconstructed in 1817. Additions include the South Portico (1824), the North Portico (1829), the West Wing (1901), and the Oval Office (1909). In 1949, the inside was completely gutted to stabilize the building with steel framing. The grounds were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. in 1935. The mansion was named a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
Also home to: Ulysses S. Grant John Hay Herbert Hoover Paul Jennings John F. Kennedy Anna Roosevelt Halsted Eleanor Roosevelt James Roosevelt II Theodore Roosevelt Helen Herron Taft Margaret Truman Edith Bolling Galt Wilson
Rose Elizabeth Cleveland
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Located in Lafayette Square neighborhood, Northwest - East of Rock Creek