Hiram Ulysses Grant was born in Point Pleasant in April 1822. In 1823, his parents moved twenty miles east to Georgetown, where his father opened his own tannery. Ulysses worked in his father's tannery and, from the ages of about six to thirteen, he attended classes in the little schoolhouse on Water Street. The building, built in 1829, consisted of only one room at the time. The teacher was John White, whom Grant mentions in his memoirs.

Later, he attended an academy in Maysville, Kentucky, for a year, and then John Rankin's academy at Ripley for a year. His father then succeeded in getting him appointed to West Point where, through a bureaucratic error, his name was listed as Ulysses Simpson Grant.