James Buchanan’s Birthplace, Pennsylvania

James Buchanan, the nation’s 15th president, was born in a log cabin in 1791 at Stony Batter, his parents’ frontier trading post at Cove Gap, Pennsylvania, now inside Buchanan’s Birthplace State Park. The site is still remote and rural, and has a considerable amount of interpretation describing conditions here at that time, his presidency (1857-1861), and how his family moved to nearby Mercersburg to run a store when he was six. When they left Stony Batter, the property was purchased by a local family, and remained in private hands until 1906, when it was purchased by a trust, executing the last wishes of James Buchanan’s niece, Harriet Rebecca Lane. Harriet’s parents died when she was 11 years old, and James Buchanan became her guardian. He never married, and when he was in the White House, she served as his first lady, arranging social activities, doing humanitarian work, and guarding his legacy. She died in 1903, leaving $100,000 to a trust to make two memorials to her beloved uncle. One is a statue in Washington DC, and the other is here, in the form of a pyramid. The construction of the 31 foot-tall pyramid involved 35 men, and required building a small railroad to move 300 tons of material to the site. In 1911, after construction was completed by the trust and its assigned architects, the entire 18.5-acre property was donated to the state, making it the smallest park in the state park system.