resolute

The Resolute desk, also known as the Hayes desk, is a nineteenth-century partners' desk used by several presidents of the United States in the White House as the Oval Office desk, including the five most recent presidents. The desk was a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 and was built from the oak timbers of the British Arctic exploration ship HMS Resolute. The 1,300-pound (590-kilogram) desk was created by William Evenden, a skilled joiner at Chatham Dockyard in Kent, probably from a design by Morant, Boyd, & Blanford.
HMS Resolute was abandoned in the Arctic waterway Tariyunnuaq in 1854 while searching for Sir John Franklin and his lost expedition. It was found in 1855 floating in Davis Strait by George Henry, an American whaling ship. Resolute was repaired and returned to England as a gesture of goodwill from the United States. After serving in the British Navy as a supply vessel, the ship was decommissioned in 1879 and subsequently broken up in Chatham Dockyard in Chatham, England. A competition was held to design and build a piece of furniture that Queen Victoria could give to the American president, built from its timbers. Morant, Boyd, & Blanford won this contest, and this desk was constructed shortly after. Two other furniture pieces were created from the timbers of the Resolute: the Grinnell desk, made for the widow of Henry Grinnell who spent enormous sums of money trying to find Sir John Franklin and his ships; and a table made for Queen Victoria for her steam-powered yacht, HMY Victoria and Albert.
The Resolute desk was received at the White House on November 23, 1880, and shortly after was moved to the second floor. It stayed in the President's Office and President's Study on the east side of the second floor until the White House Reconstruction from 1948 to 1952. After the reconstruction, it was placed in the Broadcast Room where Dwight D. Eisenhower used it during both radio and television broadcasts. Jackie Kennedy rediscovered the desk languishing under electrical equipment and had it brought to the Oval Office in 1961. The desk was removed from the White House after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, when President Lyndon Johnson allowed it to be taken on a traveling exhibition with artifacts of the Kennedy Presidential Library. It was then put on display in the Smithsonian Institution. President Jimmy Carter brought the desk back to the Oval Office in 1977, where it has remained since, save that George H. W. Bush used the C&O desk in the Oval Office but kept the Resolute desk in the White House.
The desk has been modified twice. Franklin Roosevelt requested the addition of a door with the presidential seal to conceal his leg braces and a safe, but it was not installed until 1945, after his death. A two-inch tall plinth was added to the desk in 1961 and replaced in 1986. Many replicas have been made of the Resolute desk; the first replica was commissioned in 1978 for a permanent display at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, Massachusetts, and since then five other presidential libraries and countless other museums, libraries, tourist attractions, and private homes and offices have acquired copies of the desk.

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