http://www.whitehouse.gov/

June 4, 1999
Web posted at: 5:12 p.m. EDT (2112 GMT)

In this story: ·Virginia: George Washington ·Tennessee: Andrew Jackson ·Illinois: Abraham Lincoln ·Vermont: Calvin Coolidge ·Texas: Lyndon Johnson RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Jennifer Merin
Los Angeles Times Syndicate

(Los Angeles Times Syndicate) -- Visiting the White House is a rite of passage for many travelers. Even international tourists may not consider their journey to the United States complete without seeing where the leader of the free world lives.

The White House also represents a compilation of presidential personalities, and if you want to capture more individualized glimpses of these men, visit the places where they were born and grew up, where their personalities took shape and their lifestyles were most clearly manifested, or where they settled after office.

Here are five of the most popular presidential home sites:

George Washington's estate at Mount Vernon, Virginia, is situated on a high bluff overlooking the Potomac River just 16 miles (26 kilometers) from downtown Washington, D.C. This site is the oldest continuously operating historic home in the country and attracts more than a million visitors annually.

http://www.mountvernon.org/

Mount Vernon began as a modest home but grew in stages into a mansion. The first one and a half stories were built by his father when George Washington was a boy. Washington added a second story when he brought his bride, Martha, home in 1759. The colonnaded piazza with a beautiful river view was added during an expansion from 1774-1787. Washington placed the famous dove-of-peace weather vane atop the cupola after he returned from the Revolutionary War.

Washington's public life and responsibilities prevented him from living at Mount Vernon much of the time, but he did stay there for two uninterrupted years before his death in 1799.

Andrew Jackson's home, The Hermitage, near Nashville, Tennessee, has been open to the public since 1889. The seventh president and his wife, Rachel, moved to the property in 1804, though work on the two-story house -- designed with four rooms on each floor opening to a central hallway -- began in 1819, after Jackson was recognized as a military hero.

http://www.hermitage.org/

The house, which was expanded during Jackson's first term, was gutted by fire during his second term. Reconstruction converted the property into a Greek-revival plantation, with six two-story Corinthian columns and Greek elements in the interior design.

Hermitage tours include the copper-domed tomb Jackson built for Rachel in 1831, and where he was buried in 1845; the Old Hermitage Church; and the recently excavated site of cabins where Jackson housed 150 slaves at the time of his death.

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president, purchased his house in Springfield, Illinois, for $1,500 in 1844 and lived there with his family for 17 years. The two-story frame house is the only home Lincoln ever owned. When he was elected president and then left Springfield for Washington in 1861, he sold most of his furniture. Shortly after his assassination in 1865, a search began for the furniture and other memorabilia. Of 100 known Lincoln pieces, about half are exhibited in the Lincoln house.

http://www.nps.gov/liho/

The original bed -- with the 6-foot-9-inch (2.03-meter) mattress --is believed to have burned in the Chicago Fire of 1871. Lincoln's bedroom, a large chamber with a 12-foot-high (3.6-meter) ceiling, is now occupied by a massive four-poster bed that, according to historical photographs, is similar to the original.

Lincoln is buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery with his wife and three of their sons. Robert Todd Lincoln, their only son to survive to adulthood, gave the house to the state of Illinois in 1887. In 1972, it was transferred to the National Park Service and is now part of the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, along with 18 additional Lincoln-related buildings, including the home of Jesse K. Dubois, an important personal and political friend.

Calvin Coolidge (the 30th president), whose laconic manner reflected his New England upbringing, was born in a clapboard wing attached to the general store owned by his father in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, a scenic town where the changing seasons paint a glorious array of colors against the background of gray mountains. Except for the addition of a visitors center, built in 1972 from locally quarried stone, Plymouth Notch has changed little since Coolidge's father administered the presidential oath of office at the family home in August 1923, after news of President Harding's death reached town.

http://www.state.vt.us/dca/historic/hp_sites.htm#coolidge

A self-guided tour around the town features 14 stops, including the family house; the Union Christian Church built in 1840 (the Coolidge family pew is third from the front on the left); the Plymouth Cheese Factory, still producing the same type of cheese it did in when it opened in 1890; three cabins built in 1920 to accommodate tourists who came to town to see where Coolidge lived; and the Plymouth Notch Cemetery, where "Silent Cal" is buried in an inconspicuous grave, along with six generations of his family.

http://www.nps.gov/lyjo

Lyndon Johnson, the 36th president, is memorialized by the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park in Johnson City, Texas. The town (named for James Polk Johnson, the president's second cousin) and its surroundings are saturated with the family history and lore, beginning with settlement by the president's grandparents after the Civil War; his birth house near the Pedernales River; and his boyhood home (a 1901 frame house into which the Johnsons moved in 1913, when Lyndon was 5). Also located nearby are the "Texas White House," which he visited during his presidency, and the nearby LBJ Ranch, which he bought in 1951, when he was a U.S. senator.

A bus tour visits the ranch house (his widow, Lady Bird Johnson, still lives there); Johnson's birth house (now rebuilt as a ranch guest house); the Junction School (Johnson enrolled there at age 4 and, in 1965, returned to sign the Elementary and Secondary Education Acts); and the site where Johnson was buried after his death in 1973.

Copyright © 1999, Jennifer Merin
Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate

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