Lamar, Missouri: Where Truman Was Born

On May eighth, eighteen eighty-four, in the southwest bedroom of a small frame house in Lamar, Missouri, Harry S. Truman came into the world. His parents, John and Martha Truman, had paid six hundred eighty-five dollars for the house two years earlier.

Harry was eleven months old when the family moved on to Harrisonville and then Belton and Grandview, and Lamar would remain simply the town where the thirty-third president of the United States was born. The house was bought by the United Auto Workers in nineteen fifty-seven, donated to the state of Missouri, and dedicated as a historic site in nineteen fifty-nine at a ceremony Truman himself attended. It has been a state historic site ever since, a modest two-story house, about the size of a large living room by modern standards, sitting in the middle of a Barton County town of roughly four thousand people.

Truman is the only American president born in Missouri.