First Ladies National Historic Site

Canton, Ohio holds a distinction that belongs to no other city: it is home to the only site in the world dedicated entirely to the First Ladies of the United States. The centerpiece is the Saxton McKinley House, built in the eighteen forties and the childhood home of Ida Saxton, who married William McKinley in eighteen seventy-one and served as First Lady during his presidency in the late eighteen nineties. The house was restored to its Victorian-era appearance in the mid-nineteen nineties and opened to the public in nineteen ninety-eight.

Congress established the National Historic Site formally in two thousand. The museum documents not just Ida McKinley but every woman who held the role, framing it as a study of political partnership and public life across two and a half centuries.