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Silent Cal's Vermont Roots Calvin Coolidge's Plymouth Notch By Paul Robbins
Coolidge's father, a notary public, woke his son with the news and then swore him in as president. "The oath was taken in what we always called the sitting room by the light of the kerosene lamp, which was the most modern form of lighting that had then reached the neighborhood," Coolidge later wrote. Today tiny Plymouth Notch has electricity (and a few more phones), but if Coolidge were to return to the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site today, he'd feel right at home. The hamlet where he was born on July 4, 1872, where he was sworn in as president at 2:47 a.m. on August 3, 1923, and where he was buried after dying in retirement January 5, 1933, is preserved like a freeze-frame of the small farming community he knew so well. It's modest, understated—Coolidge-like.
They've blacktopped the few roads, but in perhaps the truest Vermont fashion, Plymouth Notch remains your basic make-do-get-by village: post office, general store, school, church, cheese factory. There's also a visitor center, made of fieldstone and looking like a farmhouse from the last century. It's the lone structure that wasn't standing when Coolidge became president. Here visitors can see photographs and exhibits from all phases of Coolidge's life. There are also samples of the fashionable wardrobe worn by his wife, Grace, also a Vermont native and, by all accounts, as outgoing as Coolidge was tight-lipped. The historic site includes 10 buildings open to the public. The Coolidge birthplace is a downstairs bedroom behind the general store, which his father owned and ran. He sold the business in 1917. In 1924 Coolidge turned the upstairs area, now called Coolidge Hall, into the office for his Summer White House. When Coolidge was four the family moved across the street to the house known today as the Coolidge Homestead. Rooms look exactly as they did in 1923—even the kerosene lamp used during the swearing-in is here. The homestead, managed by the state Division for Historic Preservation, was given to the state in 1956 by Coolidge's son, John, who spends the warm weather months in town. Other Plymouth Notch buildings include the Union Christian Church, dating from 1840, and the Wilder Barn (circa 1875), which houses a collection of nineteenth-century farm equipment and horse-drawn vehicles. The adjoining Wilder House, built circa 1830, is where Coolidge's mother grew up and where she married his father in 1868. Today it operates as a restaurant that serves breakfast and lunch. The Plymouth Cheese Factory, started by Coolidge's father and some locals in the 1890s, closed during the Depression but was revived in the 1960s by Coolidge's son. It's open year-round (closed weekends in winter). The future president went to a village school here, but for high school he attended Black River Academy in Ludlow, about 15 miles away. He stayed there during the week and returned home each weekend. It was in Massachusetts, however, that Coolidge made his career. After graduating from Amherst College, Coolidge became a lawyer in Massachusetts, then Northampton city councilor and later mayor, and eventually governor of Massachusetts. He made a national name for himself when he called out the National Guard to break a strike by Boston police. "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time," he said. After replacing Harding, Coolidge was elected in his own right in 1924 but took himself out of the 1928 presidential race. One irony that can't be missed is that the nation's chief executive for more than half the decade remembered as the "Roaring Twenties" was almost a polar opposite of that high-energy, high-octane period. Called "Silent Cal" because he often spoke as if he were being charged for each word, Coolidge gained a reputation as a typically taciturn New Englander. In one oft-told tale, a woman approached the president and said she had made a bet she could get more than two words out of him. "You lose," said Coolidge. Coolidge died in Massachusetts after suffering a heart attack at his Northampton home in 1933, but he returned to Plymouth Notch one last time to be buried on the hillside cemetery beside his wife. His headstone reads, in typical Coolidge understatement: Calvin Coolidge July 4, 1872 January 5, 1933.
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Copyright © 2001: Primedia Enthusiast Publications, Inc. and Away.com. All Rights Reserved Image: Vermont Division for Historic Preservation | |
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