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View search results on mapWarren G. Harding was born on a farm in Corsica, Ohio (now called Blooming Grove) in 1865. His father was a country doctor and farmer, and he was the first of eight children. The house he was born in disappeared long ago, and a small marker rests in the front lawn of a later house. In the last year of his life, while president, Harding secretly purchased the old farm property he was born at, with the intention of building a house to retire in (along with a golf course).
As a teenager, Warren G. Harding, the future 29th president of the USA, moved to Marion, Ohio, and took various jobs, before working for the local newspaper, which he purchased two years later, and grew into a prosperous business. He built a Queen Anne-style house in Marion and moved in with his new wife, Florence. They lived here for 30 years, until they moved to the White House in 1921.
Warren G. Harding, the 29th president of the USA, and his wife, are buried side by side in a neoclassical memorial a mile from the house the lived in for 30 years. The circular memorial of Georgian marble rests in ten acres of parkland next to the town cemetery, in Marion. Harding died in 1923, while in office.
Plymouth Notch is a Vermont town that has been preserved by the state of Vermont, and the legacy of Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the USA. Coolidge was born here on the 4th of July, 1872, and in 1923, 47 years later, Coolidge was visiting his parents when he heard that President Harding had died, and that he was now the president of the United States. His father, a notary public, administered the oath of office in the family’s living room.
Calvin Coolidge rented the left half of this modest duplex house and lived here for 24 years, even as he became mayor of the city, governor of the state, and president of the nation. After leaving office, Coolidge returned to the house, but a constant stream of visitation from a curious public took a toll on him and his neighbors. He moved to a nearby house, located at the end of a street, with gates on the driveway, and lived there till he died, in 1933. It too was a rental.
Herbert Hoover was the earliest president to create a historic park for himself, with his birthplace, library, museum, and tomb, all in one place, open to the public. His presidential library and museum opened in 1962, on a spot chosen by Hoover, and he was there for the dedication, on his 88th birthday. The library is one of thirteen official presidential libraries that are managed by the National Archives.
At Hyde Park, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the USA, created a trifecta of birthplace, legacy home/museum, and tomb in one place. He also established the precedent for the official presidential library at his home site too, which he designed and built while he was still living there. All presidents since him have selected a place for their official library and archive.
Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the USA, had personal issues with her mother-in-law, Sara, who lived at FDR’s home at Hyde Park until her death in 1941, and had issues with her husband, too, for that matter. With her own personal wealth, social prominence, and strong values, she conducted her life out of an estate near Hyde Park, a place called Val-Kill. FDR helped design her cottage there, which was completed in 1923.
A path at the back of the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site leads up the hill to Top Cottage. This was Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the 32nd president of the USA)’s getaway place, which he designed and built for himself in 1939, on top of the hill overlooking his Hyde Park estate and the Hudson Valley below. Top Cottage opened to the public in 2001.
Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, was born in 1884, in this house in Lamar, Missouri. His father was a mule salesman, and bought the house from its builder when it was new, in 1882, for $685. They moved out ten months later, to a farm in Harrisonville, and sold the house in Lamar. The house was later owned by a cousin of Wyatt Earp, who sold it to the United Auto Workers in 1956 for $6,000, so they could donate it to the state.
In 1919, Harry S. Truman, who would become the 33rd president of the United States, returned home from World War One, and married Bess, his longtime sweetheart. They moved in with her mother at 219 Delaware Street, in Independence, which would be their home for the rest of their lives. It’s a 14-room Victorian, built by Bess’ grandparents in 1885.
When Harry Truman came home to Independence, Missouri, after his presidency ended in 1953, he worked on establishing his presidential library and museum, located a few blocks north of downtown. It opened in 1957, and he moved his office there, and continued working, writing, meeting, and even answering the phone there, for the next 15 years.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would become the nation’s 34th president, was born in 1890 in the front downstairs bedroom of this house in Denison, Texas, near the border of Oklahoma. His father worked for the railroad, which ran right by the house, and rented this home for his wife and two sons. When Eisenhower was two they moved to Kansas, and for 50 years no notice was made of the house’s historical significance.
Dwight D. Eisenhower helped to develop the Eisenhower Presidential Center as his primary and official legacy location during the period after he left the White House in 1961, until his death in 1969. It covers a few acres of land around his boyhood home, and includes the official Presidential Library, Museum, and his tomb.
After Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency ended in 1961, and while the Eisenhower’s were involved in designing his Presidential Center in Abilene, they were living, most of the time, in semi-retirement on a farm in Pennsylvania. The Eisenhower’s bought the farm in 1950, motivated primarily by Mamie Eisenhower. She worked with architects on the additions and transformations of the existing structures into a new house with eight bedrooms and nine bathrooms.
John F. Kennedy, who would become the 35th president of the USA, was born in this house in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1917, the first president born in the 20th century. Three years later, his family moved to a larger house two blocks away, then in 1927 to New York City. The birthplace house was sold out of the family, but was bought back by the Kennedys in 1966, some years after JFK's death.
Geographically, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the USA, is perhaps most associated with the Cape Cod town of Hyannis Port. The Kennedy family compound in his time consisted of three adjacent houses on six acres next to the beach. The main house, where he spent most of his summers as a child, was first rented, then purchased by his parents in 1928. Senator Ted Kennedy inherited the house and lived there from 1982 until his death in 2009.
The former town hall building in downtown Hyannis is now the John F. Kennedy Hyannis Museum, owned and operated by a private foundation, not directly related to the family. It is administered by the local Chamber of Commerce, and opened in 1992 to allow people to get a sense of Kennedy’s history in Hyannis Port, since the Kennedy family compound nearby is not open to the public.
A Navy man, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the USA, is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. His principal legacy site, though, is the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. The building opened in 1979, and is a dramatic modern structure designed by I. M. Pei. Inside are period rooms and galleries depicting his life, and time in the White House.
In 1908, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who would become the 36th president of the USA, was born on a ranch in Texas hill country. At the time, his parents were living in a small dogtrot house (so named for the open breezeway though the structure), on their family’s ranch. Six years later they moved with their children to nearby Johnson City.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the USA, built his presidential library at the University of Texas, in the state capitol, Austin, an hour east of the LBJ Ranch, his legacy location, maintained by the federal government and his family. The library opened in 1971, and he was on hand at its dedication, along with his successor, Richard Nixon.
The 1970s saw two new Smithsonian museums on the Mall, the nation’s modern and contemporary art museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Air and Space Museum, conceived to display aircraft soon after World War Two, but not built until 1976. Displays in the Air and Space museum are battle-ready, for the throngs of school kids that course through the cavernous interior.
The Smithsonian once held as many as 18,000 native American human remains in its collection, as well as many thousands of artifacts sacred and otherwise taken from native Americans over the period of conquest of the American continent. It has repatriated much of this collection, but not all. This museum opened in 2004, and allows some Native Americans to tell their story in their own way.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture was established in 2003, and opened in a new building in 2016. It has 3,500 items on display in a 350,000 square foot museum, with five levels below grade, and five levels above.
The National Geographic Society was founded in 1888 in the nation’s capital to “increase and diffuse geographic knowledge.” Its founding president was Gardiner Green Hubbard, the president of Bell Telephone. The second president of the society was Alexander Graham Bell himself, who was married to Hubbard’s daughter. The famous and influential National Geographic Magazine was edited by Bell’s son-in-law Gilbert Grosvenor.
The US Department of Agriculture’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center is a sprawling, 7,000 acre research farm with fields, woodlands, and numerous laboratory complexes. BARC claims to be the largest and most diversified agricultural research complex in the world, conducting research into large-scale farming practices including beef, pig, and poultry raising, pesticides, nutrition, and other programs of interest to the American agricultural industry.
The National Cryptologic Museum is located just outside the gates of the National Security Agency (NSA), an organization that employs tens of thousands of people in the daunting task of intercepting, decoding, and classifying communications all over the world for the American intelligence community.
The attic for the nation’s museum, the Smithsonian, is the Smithsonian Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland, the institutes primary storage and conservation complex. Around 54 million items are stored in five numbered pod buildings, with a total of 435,000 square feet of storage. Next door to it is an even larger storage and collections complex, though less high-tech, which includes the Garber Facility, used by the Air and Space Museum.
The National Archives manages this large records building in Suitland, Maryland (just north of the Smithsonian’s principal off-site storage facility, the Museum Support Center). The facility was constructed in 1967 as the Washington National Records Center for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and is still used by them.
Suitland Federal Center is a secure federal site with a number of information gathering, storage, processing, and management facilities. On site is the headquarters of the US Census Bureau, the National Maritime Intelligence Center, National Archives Washington National Records Center, a Federal Protective Services mega center, and a NOAA satellite operations facility that is mostly underground.