Woodrow Wilson Birthplace Museum and Library, Virginia

Woodrow Wilson, who would become the nations 28^th president, was born in 1856 in this parsonage in Staunton, Virginia. His parents had moved into the house the year before, when his father became pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in town, and they moved away from Staunton in 1858. Efforts to preserve the birthplace began after he died, in 1924. The Woodrow Wilson Birthplace Foundation was established, and purchased the home in 1938. In 1940 work began to restore it to its appearance in 1856, and it was dedicated officially by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941. The admissions desk and gift shop are located in the brick house next door, which is part of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum complex. Inside are displays about Wilson’s life in the house, and his presidency. The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Research Center is located in a fourth converted house on the block. The main repository for his papers is the manuscript library at Princeton, where he served as president of the university for nine years. Two other houses he lived have been turned into museum sites, including the Woodrow Wilson Boyhood Home in Augusta, Georgia, where he lived from the ages of 2 and 13. The family moved again when his father was offered a job as a pastor and a professor at a theological seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, and they lived there until 1874. After that, Woodrow Wilson went off to college at Princeton, then law school at the University of Virginia, and got a doctorate at Johns Hopkins. He practiced law in Atlanta, got married in Savannah, then moved to Princeton to be a professor in 1890, became president of Princeton in 1902, then governor of New Jersey, in 1910, and President of the United States for two terms, 1913-1921.