Before Trump, America’s first president to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms grew up in Fayetteville

With his Election Night victory this week, Donald Trump did something that had only been once before in American history.
He will be the second President to serve two nonconsecutive terms.
Trump joins Grover Cleveland, Chief Executive 22 and 24, who served from 1885 to 1889, lost the election in 1888, then returned to the White House for a second term from 1893 to 1897.
Before being chosen as the Commander in Chief, Cleveland served as mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York.
But before all that, as boy, Cleveland grew up right here in Central New York, his formative years spent at a house which still stands, at 109 Academy Street in the village of Fayetteville.
In fact, the three-bedroom house, built in 1841, is currently for sale for $1.5 million.
It was in that house that Cleveland had perhaps his first inkling of becoming a future president.
When he was nine years old and studying at the old Fayetteville Academy across the street, Cleveland turned in an essay on the subject of “Time.”
He wrote:
“Time is divided into seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and centuries. If we expect to become great and good men and be respected and esteemed by our friends, we must improve our time when we are young. A great many of our great men were poor and had small means of obtaining an education but by improving their time whey were young and in school they obtained their high standing.”
Using George Washington and Andrew Jackson as examples, the young Cleveland wrote that “if we wish to become great and useful in the world, we must improve our time in school.”
Stephen Grover Cleveland was born in New Jersey in 1837. His father was a Presbyterian minister, who moved his family to Fayetteville in 1841.
In another school essay, young Cleveland described his boyhood hometown this way:
“Fayetteville is quite a pleasant village, though quite small. The people have begun improvements, and I think it will turn out to be a year of improvements.”
He was a good student.
Following his death in 1908, The Post-Standard interviewed one of his friends, Platt Smith, who noted that Cleveland was “always quite brilliant and well up in his work.”
Outside of school, he swam and fished in Limestone Creek and Green Lake, and, according to Smith and local legend, was something of a prankster with his friends.
“The boys were all funny,” Smith said, “and they were always prime favorites with rest of the school.”
He recounted a Fourth of July prank where Cleveland and others painted a horse in stars and stripes, boosted it up onto a roof of a store and left it tied up there with a bundle of hay to eat.
“The first thing the villagers saw when they got up next morning was this old nag decorated for the Fourth on top of the store,” Smith remembered. “Of course, everyone wondered how it got there but no one found out.”
Another time, the future president and his mates snuck an energetic bull calf into the basement of their school. When the principal heard the racket, the cow was making, the animal “butted him all over the room.”
According to his close friend F.G. Tibbitts, Cleveland loved the pranks.
“He would retain perfect command of his features until his victims’ back was turned,” a Syracuse Standard article said in 1887. “Then he would swell up, puff out his cheeks and snort and snicker, as if the other fellow’s stupidity was intensely amusing.”
Not so funny was the time when his gang climbed the lightning rod of the Fayetteville school late one night to ring the bell and wake everyone up.
When they were caught, they slid down. Cleveland ended up impaling his leg on the metal and hung there.
“His companions succeeded in freeing Grover, who was by this in considerable pain, and all dropped to the ground together, just in time to flee from the indignant trustees,” the Syracuse Herald said in 1908. “In a nearby brook they washed off Grover’s wound.”
In 1851, the Cleveland family moved to Clinton, N.Y.
Cleveland would return to Fayetteville in 1852 and worked at John McVicar’s grocery store. He slept upstairs, with his friend Tibbitts, in a small room above the store.
“In the winter we fairly froze sometimes,” Tibbitts said. “There was no stove in the room. Rats ran in the walls and often peered at us from holes in the plaster.”
From these humble beginnings, Cleveland would move onto Buffalo in 1855 and began a clerkship at a city law firm. He was admitted to the New York bar in 1859.
By 1863, he was assistant district attorney general of Erie County, then was elected county sheriff in 1870.
His meteoric rise ended in the White House in 1885.
Cleveland never forget where he came from.
On July 17, 1887, he returned to his boyhood home, accompanied by his wife, Frances Folsom, who he had married the year before.
In a short speech, he joked about remembering “Green Lake and the fish that I tried to catch and never caught…which I suppose are there today.”
He finished his speech with this:
“Fayetteville and those days so many years ago are the firmest and pleasantest memories that my memory dwells upon. I have taken you and the village of Fayetteville with me. You are part of this administration. I promise to perform my duties so as to receive the approbation of the people of Fayetteville, my oldest and best friends.”