Calvin Coolidge's Plymouth Notch

At two thirty in the morning on August third, nineteen twenty-three, a knock at the farmhouse door in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, woke Calvin Coolidge from sleep. The messenger carried news that Warren Harding had died in San Francisco. Coolidge was Vice President of the United States. He was now President.

His father, John Coolidge, was a notary public. There was no federal judge available at two thirty in the morning in a Vermont farming village that had no telephone connection to the outside world. The elder Coolidge administered the oath of office by kerosene lamp in the parlor, because the house had no electricity. Calvin Coolidge placed his hand on the family Bible and was sworn in as the thirtieth President of the United States by his father, who was empowered by the state of Vermont to notarize documents.

The question of whether a state notary public had the legal authority to administer the presidential oath was raised afterward. The Coolidge administration's answer was that he took the oath again, from a proper federal official, when he returned to Washington. The Plymouth Notch scene stood.

The village today is the most intact presidential birthplace site in the United States. The houses have not been moved. The general store where the family transacted its affairs is still there. The barn, the cheese factory that Coolidge's father ran, the church, the small house where the oath was administered, all of it is here in the proportions and arrangements of nineteen twenty-three. The gold dome of the statehouse in Montpelier is thirty miles north, and everything Vermont's formal institutions represent is there. Plymouth Notch is where Vermont's other tradition lives, the one that runs to directness, frugality, and the idea that serious work can happen in modest rooms by lamplight.