Warren G. Harding

Warren 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). Instead, he died in office the following year.

As a teenager, Warren 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.

There is a small visitor center and gift shop in a converted Sears Roebuck shed in the yard.

Next to that is a portable voting booth used during his election.

Harding died in 1923, while president, suffering from a heart attack in San Francisco, on his way back from Alaska. Though he was aware of corruption within his administration, the scandal he is most associated with, Teapot Dome, played out after his death.

His wife died the year after he did, and willed the house and much of its contents to the Harding Memorial Association. Parts of it opened to the public in 1926. It was restored in 1965, and is now owned by the state of Ohio.

Harding and his wife are buried side by side in a neoclassical memorial a mile from the house.

The circular memorial of Georgian marble rests in ten acres of parkland next to the town cemetery, in Marion.