William J. Clinton

Bill Clinton was born in Hope, Arkansas, in a hospital which burned down sometime later and is now the site of a funeral home. His father died in a car accident before he was born, so his mother lived with his maternal grandparents in this house, which is where Clinton spent the first four years of his life, starting in 1946.

He moved away with his mother and her new husband in 1950, and his grandparents continued to live there until 1956. After that, the house changed hands several times, and was vacant when it was damaged from an electrical fire in 1992.

After Clinton became president in 1993, money was raised to purchase and restore the house. It opened to the public in 1997 as a museum called the President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site (though he was actually born in a nearby hospital).

The house was transferred from the nonprofit Clinton Birthplace Foundation to the National Park Service in 2010, making it the seventh presidential birthplace/first home that is protected as a National Historic Site. There is a visitor center located in a former home next door.

Inside is a reception desk and a small gift shop.

Also inside are displays about the house and his family.

It is a typical four square house of the period, located next to the railroad tracks, and across from a used car lot.

Early Christmas morning, 2015, arsonists tagged the structure with cryptic graffiti and set fire to it. The fire was extinguished by the fire department, but the facility was closed to the public for months. A tarp covers the unrepaired portion at the back of the house.

Bill Clinton’s mother remarried when he was three, and both of them took the last name of his stepfather, Roger Clinton, a car salesman, and, as it turned out, a gambler and alcoholic, who beat his wife.

In 1950, the young family got their own place in Hope, a small house at 321 East 13th Street, which now has a historic plaque at the sidewalk, and a large sign on the fence indicating that it was a childhood home of Bill Clinton.

In 2005 the house was purchased by the Clinton Birthplace Foundation.

Though he left Hope in 1953, when he was seven years old, this is the town he embraced, and that embraces him.

The town’s Visitor Information Center, located in the train depot, serves as a local museum.

Inside are displays about Bill Clinton.

While Hillary waits in the ladies room.

In 1953 the young family left Hope and moved to Hot Springs, where Clinton grew up, graduating from high school in 1964.

For their first six years in town, the family lived in this house, at 1011 Park Avenue. The house was placed on the National Register in 1995, and is described as a modified Queen Anne, Tudor Revival, Swiss Chalet style home.

It is still privately owned and occupied.

From 1961 to 1964 they lived in this house, at 213 Scully Street, a newer brick ranch house in a small residential subdivision. After this, Clinton left Hot Springs to go to college, to Georgetown, to Oxford, and then to Yale Law School, where he met Hillary Rodham.

In 1974 the couple came to Fayetteville to teach at the University of Arkansas School of Law. They bought this house, which was owned by Senator J. William Fullbright’s sister, in 1975, and got married in the living room, later that year, forming “the most powerful union in politics.”

The house on West Clinton Drive (so named in 2010, when the house was placed on the National Register) and surrounded by the campus, is now a museum to the Clintons.

Inside are displays about the couple, and Bill’s early years in politics, and a facsimile of the wedding dress Hillary wore when they married in the same room where it is displayed.

There is also a gift shop.

Outside is the First Ladies Garden, dedicated by Bill Clinton in 2010, where the favorite flower of each of the first ladies is planted, next to a plaque.

They sold the house in 1976, when Bill became the Attorney General for Arkansas, and he and Hillary moved to the state capitol, Little Rock, where they lived in this house, at 5419 L Street.

In 1979 he was elected governor and they moved into the Governor’s Mansion when he was just 32 years old. He was defeated in an election the following year, and the couple, with their infant daughter Chelsea, lived in to this house at 816 Midland Street. He was elected governor again in 1983, and they moved back to the Governor’s Mansion.

In 2000, the Clintons purchased a second home, for use while they are in Washington DC, which, for Hillary especially, has been most of the time. The house, valued at more than $5 million, is at the end of Whitehaven Street, off Embassy Row, where mansions serve as formal, social theaters for statecraft among the world’s political elite.

The Clintons lived in the Governor’s Mansion until 1992, when he was elected president, and they moved to the White House, where they lived until 2001.

Clinton picked the city of Little Rock for his presidential library and museum, which also contains the offices of the Clinton Foundation. Ground was broken in 2001, the year he left office, and the museum opened three years later, costing $180 million, mostly privately raised funds.

It was a major part of a revitalization project along the downtown waterfront, and is now at the center of the 30 acre Clinton Presidential Park.

Inside the library, the main gallery shows archives and displays, and was modeled after the Long Room of the library at Trinity College, Dublin, where Clinton studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Exhibits include a timeline with eight slanted panels depicting and describing his time in office.

And the requisite reconstruction of the Oval Office as it looked during his time in it.

After serving two terms, the couple moved into a house they bought in 1999 at Chappaqua, New York, their first private home since living at 816 Midland, in Little Rock, in 1983.

They paid $1.7 million for this house, near the leafy affluent Westchester County community, an hour up the Saw Mill River Parkway from Manhattan. One of its features was invisibility from the public street, and a barn that could be converted into a Secret Service center.

Though purchased in New York state to allow Hillary to run for State office, this is still the Clintons’ primary residence, and is where the press is often staked out to catch them - her especially - coming and going through the gate at the end of the cul-de-sac.