A Visit to Plymouth Notch to Commune with Calvin Coolidge

Assembling his presidential historic site took years, but it’s a captivating experience.

L ast year I wrote two stories on presidential homes, one on the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s grand house in Nashville, and the other on Franklin Roosevelt’s lifelong home, also grand, in Hyde Park in Upstate New York. Neither is known for art, but they’re museums and fair game. Springwood, the proper name for FDR’s house since Hyde Park is the town, also houses the first presidential library, which opened in 1940 under FDR’s close supervision. He was an expert image-maker and storyteller, so he understood the value of a cottage industry dedicated to himself and his reputation.

A few weeks ago, I visited Plymouth Notch, the Vermont hamlet where Calvin Coolidge was born, grew up, and summered. He’s buried there among generations of Coolidges. Coolidge (1872–1933) was a Massachusetts pol. He left Plymouth for college at Amherst and, like tens of thousands of young people, to this day, who leave Vermont for school or a first job, he never came back. His political base was Northampton and, more broadly, western Massachusetts. There, he held more elective offices than any other president before or since, starting as a city councilman and mayor, moving to the legislature, then lieutenant governor, then governor, Warren Harding’s vice president, and, when Harding died in 1923, president.

Today, nearly all of Plymouth Notch, basically two intersecting roads and a dozen or so vintage buildings, is the President Calvin Coolidge Historic Site, run by the State of Vermont. The general store, run by Coolidge’s father in the back of which Coolidge was born, a small church from 1840, a still-operating cheese factory from 1890, the house where Coolidge grew up and that was his summer White House, the little village green, and a small but most impressive visitor-and-history center expanded in 2010. Over the general store was a dance hall that doubled as the Summer White House.

“The Notch” is surrounded by the Green Mountains and forests. It’s very rural as well as very pretty. The Vermont town called Plymouth is about 49 square miles and has only around 650 people. It was first settled in the 1770s. Plymouth is tiny, but it’s not the back of beyond. Woodstock, the county seat and arguably Vermont’s toniest town, is ten miles away. The Okemo ski slopes are as close. The country cemetery where Coolidge is buried is at the edge of the historic site.

I don’t think Coolidge — emotionally or philosophically — ever left Plymouth. Massachusetts doesn’t have a governor’s mansion. While serving in the Corner Office — and squelching an insidious public-employee strike — he lived in a boarding house. His home in Northampton was a rented apartment, where he lived with his wife, Grace, whom he met while she taught at a local school for the deaf, and their two sons. He bought a house in Northampton only when he left the White House.

Coolidge was always a quintessential Vermonter, in Massachusetts by a twist of fate. He was shrewd, empirical, and laconic. He was mindful of community, respectful of boundaries, and, above all, egalitarian. “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” That’s an old Vermont expression. His roots were in Plymouth, where he knew how to run his father’s general store and his father’s farm. “Give me the boy until he’s seven, and I’ll show you the man.”

That’s from the lofty Aristotle, not Onassis but the real one. Plymouth is tiny and honestly preserved. It’s not a temple to Coolidge, as the $900 million Obama library is to Obama, since temples are grand but disingenuous places. The Clinton library, a kickback scheme, is something new in human history. They invented a new form of bribery. I’m all for hosing down keepers of the flame, and I’m nonpartisan. I do like the Reagan and Nixon libraries, Ronnie’s because it’s Ronnie, Nixie’s because it’s a scholarly place attached to his childhood house in Whittier.

Plymouth and the Coolidge site are the real thing.

I’ll write sparingly, in true Coolidge fashion, about his years as president, as my story’s about the Coolidge presidential site. The time’s ripe — August 3 is the 100th anniversary of Coolidge’s swearing-in, an event that was both simple and epic. Plymouth Notch, for the first time in its history, was a happenin’ place.

Coolidge and his wife were visiting his father, who still lived in Plymouth Notch in the house where Coolidge grew up and across the road from where Coolidge was born. Not long before midnight on August 2, 1923, a telegram arrived from Bridgewater, the town north of Plymouth, telling Coolidge that Harding had died. It wasn’t expected. Harding was in San Francisco on a Western swing and known to be bedridden at the Palace Hotel from fatigue but nothing worse. That morning, the New York Times headline read “Harding Gains,” in keeping with its sterling knack for fiction.

At the time, Plymouth had neither electricity nor phone service. Coolidge’s father read the telegram, awakened his son, and together they organized an inauguration-by-gaslight in the front parlor. Coolidge’s wife and four others were there. Coolidge’s father swore his son in with a family Bible, a copy of the Constitution close at hand, at 2:47 a.m. Then the Coolidges went back to bed.

Coolidge was not without antagonists. He was famous for breaking the Boston police strike in 1919, a win he achieved in collaboration with Samuel Gompers and the AFL, yet few wanted him as Harding’s running mate. Henry Cabot Lodge, Massachusetts’s U.S. senator, loathed him, as did many Boston Brahmin Republicans. Coolidge was from western Massachusetts and a faction ruled by small-city and rural interests. I lived in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts for years. The Boston crowd still thinks we’re rubes. Coolidge got the VP nomination in 1920 on a fluke. Half the delegates — and most of the back-room movers and shakers — had left for the saloons, and one or two for home. Coolidge was nominated from the floor and “spit spot and off we go,” as Mary Poppins said.

“You mean, Calvin Coolidge is the president,” Lodge shrieked when he got the 3 a.m. call about which he could do nothing. As right as he was about the League of Nations, Lodge was a petty ass.

Said by Theodore Roosevelt’s socialite daughter to have been “weaned on a pickle,” Coolidge was an unlikely ruler for the Roaring Twenties. An icon of thrift and probity, the antidote to debauchery, Coolidge never seemed wild about the era’s version of irrational exuberance. He retired from politics when his term expired in 1929. Though popular and effective, and a shoo-in for reelection in 1928 had he said, “Dang it, I choose to run,” historians treated him badly. Lumped with Wascally Warren and Horrible Herbert, he was an accessory before the fact to the Great Depression. They tagged Coolidge as a do-nothing president. Strange, because the one thing they claimed he did was cause the stock-market crash.

That is, until his revival began in the ’80s, when President Reagan hung Coolidge’s portrait in the White House’s Cabinet Room. Coolidge is best known today as a budget hawk, a free-marketeer but hardly an extreme one, a low taxer, and the fumigant who cleansed Washington of Harding’s crooked cronies. Taciturn though he might have been, Coolidge was an exceptionally good politician and negotiator as well as a gifted writer.

That Plymouth is so pitch-perfect is circumstance, coincidence, memory, and curiosity. Coolidge dropped dead in 1933 while shaving, two months before FDR’s inauguration. Couldn’t he face the new order, the new world? “Papa thinks there’s going to be a depression,” his wife told friends in 1928. Depressions come and go but the New Deal? Coolidge detested Hoover, whom he called “Wonder Boy” — and not for his good works. Hoover was pushy, faddish, and malleable, and Coolidge knew a flop when he saw one. Coolidge’s father had died in 1926. Coolidge inherited what’s called the Old Homestead, where he was inaugurated, and the old Coolidge farm and farmhouse. After Coolidge died, his wife and eldest son, John, owned them.

The presidential-historic-site movement isn’t an old one. Mount Vernon was a wreck until antebellum Virginia ladies spurred its restoration in the 1850s, but, for other presidents, memorials and historic sites were haphazard things. There’s not much of Coolidge in Northampton. It’s just not a Coolidge kinda place. Boy . . .  girl, they, she, ze, hir, ne, oy vey . . . has it changed.

In 1947, the State of Vermont created the historic site and started acquiring bits of Plymouth Notch, starting with an old inn where Coolidge’s mother was born, next to the Old Homestead. Grace Coolidge died in 1957. Plymouth was her husband’s thing. After his death, she stayed in Northampton and almost never ventured north to Vermont.

The family then gave the Old Homestead to the State of Vermont, with the original furnishings. Coolidge’s father had bought the house in 1876. He and Coolidge’s mother decorated it in a modest Victorian style. They weren’t hiring Bunny Williams, and Vermonters aren’t prone to redecoration. The Old Homestead, and the room where Coolidge was inaugurated, is unchanged. There’s no elegant sense of style.

In 1960, Coolidge’s son, John, and others formed a foundation to promote Coolidge’s legacy. In 1970, the dwindling congregation of the church at the heart of Plymouth Notch gave its 1840 building to the foundation. It’s one of the loveliest rural Vermont churches and our version of the old, small-town Romanesque English churches. Originally, it was a traditional Federal Revival, white box. Around 1900, it was remodeled in a Carpenter Gothic design, an Arts & Crafts version of Gothic Revival. It got a new reed organ then as well as an arched, locally cut, stained, hard-pine ceiling, walls, and new pews. The Coolidges worshipped there.

The Coolidge site was an entirely Vermont thing for many years, locally known and visited but programmatically bare. I went to Plymouth for the first time in the ’80s for an autumn apple festival. Coolidge’s son John was there as well as John’s wife, Florence. Her father had been governor of Connecticut in the ’20s. It was a typical Vermont event where everyone mixed freely. I knew a lot about Coolidge but also about Florence’s father — his parents had come poor from Ireland, and he became a General Electric pioneer and early aviation expert.

So Coolidge. Self-made and high-flying. Coolidge — and Harding — were the first presidents blind to race, religion, and origin.

The Coolidge site started with no archives. It was a one-road, one-horse house museum. Presidents in Coolidge’s era and before left the White House and went back to where they’d come from, scattering their papers and legacy to the wind. Plymouth Notch isn’t pickled. I’ve been there for sheep shearings, apple pickings, chicken roasts, and Coolidge open houses — his son’s and Florence’s, or the Old Homestead’s. On a brilliant fall Saturday, a few days after 9/11, I went to Plymouth for reassurance and calm.

For this Saturday, I’ll write about the Coolidge site’s move from a place of peace to a scholarly powerhouse.