Pierce Manse: Home of the Only President from New Hampshire

This modest Greek Revival house in Concord was where Franklin Pierce lived from eighteen forty-two to eighteen forty-eight. Pierce is the only president New Hampshire ever produced, and his time here was a pivot: his wife Jane had pressed him to resign his Senate seat and leave Washington, so he came home to practice law and serve as the state Democratic Party chairman.

When Pierce won the presidency in eighteen fifty-two, he was riding a wave of national popularity that would quickly collapse over his support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act and his inability to hold the country together as it slid toward civil war. By nineteen seventy-one the house was slated for demolition under an urban renewal plan. A group of preservationists called the Pierce Brigade raised money and moved it to its current location, and it opened as a museum in nineteen seventy-four.