“…Ultimately, in the final year of his life, his plans for the Bryant Library at Cummington, solicited from the White House by President Hayes, provided the basic design for the first presidential library in the country - that established by Hayes in Fremont, Ohio. An improbable by-product of the presidential race in 1872 was a proposal by leading journalists that Bryant become -in his seventy-eighth year - a candidate to oppose President Grant and his challenger for the Republican nomination, the mercurial editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley. …”