Calvin Coolidge and the Farmhouse on the Hill

On the morning of August third, nineteen twenty-three, Calvin Coolidge was sleeping in the farmhouse where he had been born when his father shook him awake. President Warren Harding had died of a heart attack in San Francisco the previous evening. Coolidge was now the President of the United States.

The farmhouse stood in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, a hamlet in the hills of Windsor County that had no telegraph line, no telephone connected to the outside world in any reliable way. Word of Harding's death had arrived by automobile, driven up through the mountain roads in the early morning hours. Coolidge dressed, came downstairs, and his father, a notary public and local justice of the peace, administered the oath of office to his son by the light of a kerosene lamp, just after two in the morning.

It was the only time a president has been sworn in by his own father, and it was the only time a president has taken the oath in a house without electricity.

Coolidge served nearly six years as president, winning election in his own right in nineteen twenty-four by a landslide. He presided over the Roaring Twenties with a quiet that unnerved people who expected presidents to be theatrical. He reduced the national debt. He signed the Immigration Act of nineteen twenty-four, which severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and effectively banned Asian immigration. He declined to run for re-election in nineteen twenty-eight, announcing this with a characteristic economy of language: I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty-eight.

He retired to Northampton, Massachusetts when it was over. He died there in nineteen thirty-three, of a coronary thrombosis, in the early afternoon. He is buried in the Plymouth Notch village cemetery, under a simple headstone, a hundred yards from the house where he was born and where he took the oath.

The Plymouth Notch Historic District is preserved as a Vermont state historic site and is largely unchanged from the time of his birth. There is a general store that still sells goods. The farmhouse still stands. The oil lamp is still there.