Harry S Truman Birthplace, Lamar

You are passing near Lamar, Missouri, where on May eighth, eighteen eighty-four, Harry Truman was born in the downstairs southwest bedroom of a house his parents had purchased for six hundred and eighty-five dollars. The house measures twenty by twenty-eight feet. His father planted an Austrian pine in the yard the day Harry arrived.

The family moved away when Harry was eleven months old. Truman would go on to order the use of atomic weapons to end the Second World War, integrate the United States military by executive order in nineteen forty-eight, and make the call to enter the Korean War. He remains the only American president born in Missouri.

The home was purchased by the state in nineteen fifty-seven and dedicated as a historic site two years later at a ceremony Truman himself attended.