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Plymouth Notch Vt.

6 Places That Became a Summer White House

The summer White House has featured in presidential life since John Adams returned to Quincy, Mass., to get away from the muggy heat of Washington, D.C.

Spending time away from the nation’s capital also allowed presidents to sense the country’s mood and to thank their wealthy donors. New England’s wealth and cool weather attracted presidential families in the days before air conditioning.

Here are places in each of the six New England states that became a summer White House.

The Thimble Islands, Branford, Conn.

A Thimble island

According to Connecticut legend, President William Taft spent part of a presidential summer on the Thimble Islands. The Thimbles are an archipelago of 365 small islands off the coast of Branford in the Long Island Sound.

The Branford Historical Society cautions that Taft probably only visited the Thimbles as a Yale student, though ConneticutHistory claims Taft had a summer home there for two years in the 1900s.

Rutherford B. Hayes did visit Branford as president. His grandfather was born in Branford, and his great-grandfather had built the Totoket Hotel on Main Street. In 1889, President Hayes came to Branford to see the hotel his great-grandfather built. The townspeople presented him with an axe made by his great-grandfather at a reception outside the hotel.

Totoket Hotel, photo courtesy the Branford Historical Society.

The Totoket Hotel has long disappeared, but you can still visit the Thimble Islands.

Bar Harbor, Maine

President Taft’s first summer White House in Beverly.

President William Howard Taft’s summer White House started out in Beverly, Mass. For four summers, his staff ran the government from borrowed offices in downtown Beverly.

Taft’s first hostess in the city got sick and tired of Secret Service interference, nosy tourists and the hubbub surrounding the president. She told Taft not to come back at all. She even threatened to tear down the house, located at Lynch Park. Instead, she cut it in pieces, floated it across the harbor to Marblehead and left Taft to move to a new house in the neighborhood.

Taft then announced with great fanfare in July of 1910 that he would make an extended trip to Maine. With stops planned for Eastport, Bangor, Ellsworth, Rockland and Islesboro, Taft would base his operations in Bar Harbor. There, he would stay on the 273-foot presidential yacht Mayflower, with its crew of 200.

Hancock House

A Summer White House in Maine

Taft first touched land in Eastport, then sailed on to Bar Harbor for a three-day stop.

He spent much of his time with wealthy summer residents. This caused a bit of a stir among the year-rounders, which Taft tamped down by giving a speech on the town bandstand.

“The three days that have passed in Bar Harbor will be red letter days in my life,” he told the crowd. “The air is like champagne in a Prohibition state, and without the uncomfortable consequences that follow imbibing that liquor.”

However, Taft’s visit to Mount Desert Island was not without trouble. He shot a 23 on a single hole during one round of golf when he got stuck in a sand trap. On the same course, the 300-pound-plus president tripped and sprained an ankle.

Taft at his summer White House

And, when he spoke to a crowd at the Hancock House in Ellsworth, pickpockets made off with hundreds of dollars from unsuspecting Mainers who came to hear him speak.

Most of the spots Taft visited are either gone or in private hands, but a few survive. The Bangor House Hotel is still at the corner of Main and Union streets, though it’s now housing. Taft participated in services at the stately Ellsworth Congregational Church. He took tea at the Jordan Pond House and the Kebo Country Club — the scene of Taft’s rough game — remains open to this day.

Hyannis Port, Mass.

The Kennedy Big House

The summer cottage that Joseph P. Kennedy rented in Hyannis Port in 1926 would eventually become the summer White House. Hyannis then (and now) belonged to the Irish Riviera.

The waterfront house had commanding views of Nantucket Harbor. Kennedy bought it in 1928 and set about enlarging and improving it for his growing family. It had six bedrooms and four servants’ rooms on the second floor, a wine cellar in the shape of a ship’s hull and a motion picture theater in the basement.

In 1956, Joseph Kennedy’s son John bought a smaller home of his own near the big house. In 1959, the youngest child, Edward, bought a house next to the other two in 1959. He sold it to his brother Robert and his wife, Ethel, in 1961, and later bought another home nearby.

John F. Kennedy used the compound as his headquarters for his 1960 campaign for president. He then used it as the summer White House during his presidency.

The Kennedy family at Hyannis Port, 1931

The main house was recently donated to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. The compound can’t be visited, but it can be seen from the tour boats that leave from Hyannis.

To see rare photos of the Kennedy family at the Hyannis Port compound, click here.

Cornish, N.H.

Harlakenden House

Woodrow Wilson spent several weeks in the summers of 1913 through 1915 at Harlakenden, a country estate in Cornish, N.H. Wilson leased his summer White House from Winston Churchill – the American Winston Churchill, a writer who lost a race for governor of New Hampshire in 1906.

Harlakenden sat on a bluff overlooking the Connecticut River. Cornish was the center of an art colony of about 100 artists, writers and politicians from about 1895 to the end of World War I. It stretched from Windsor, Vt., to Plainfield, N.H. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the central figure in the colony, which included Ethel Barrymore, Frederic Remington, Daniel Chester French, Isadora Duncan, Maxwell Perkins and Maxfield Parrish.

On Sept. 12, 1913, a play called Sanctuary: A Bird Masque was performed in Cornish with Wilson, his wife and the British ambassador in the audience. Miss Eleanor Wilson played the lead role and Miss Margaret Wilson sang the opening song, The Hermit Thrush. The play’s theme was the senseless slaughter of birds for frivolous purposes.

The occasion was the dedication of the Meriden, N.H., bird sanctuary – one of the first in the nation.

At the time, the Underwood Tariff Bill was in Congress . Bird-lovers everywhere wanted to ensure the bill included a ban on importation of bird feathers for decorative purposes. The play helped keep the heat on. Wilson returned from his summer White House early because the tariff bill had passed, with the language about birds intact.

Harlakenden burned to the ground, but the Cornish art colony survives as the Augustus Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site.

Newport, R.I.

Eisenhower House

In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, decamped to the Naval Base in Newport, R.I. There he dealt with the crisis over school integration in Little Rock, Ark.

He also summered in Newport during his presidency in 1958 and 1960. At first in 1958 Eisenhower stayed at the Naval War College on Coasters Harbor Island, but he wanted to be closer to the golf course at the Newport Country Club. So he moved to a mansion at Fort Adams for two summers in Newport.

Now called Eisenhower House, it was built in 1873 for Gen. Henry Jackson Hunt, a Civil War artillery officer. The house has stunning views of Narragansett Bay and Newport Harbor.

It now belongs to Fort Adams State Park, and you can rent it for weddings and social events. For more information click here.

Plymouth Notch, Vt.

Plymouth Notch

Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as president of the United States while vacationing at his boyhood home in Plymouth Notch, Vt.

His father, a notary, swore him in at 2:47 a.m. on Aug. 3, 1923, hours after President Warren G. Harding died.

Though Coolidge spent most of his adult life in Northampton, Mass., he often visited his family home. It is a modest white frame farmhouse in the classic New England style of big house, little house, back house, barn.

The Secret Service detail assigned to him slept in tents on the property. In the summer of 1924, a dance hall nearby served as his office in the summer of 1924.

Today Coolidge’s birthplace and surrounding buildings are the Calvin Coolidge Homestead District, which includes the Cilley General Store, the Post Office, the Wilder Restaurant (serving lunch), the church, several barns, the dance hall and the Plymouth Cheese factory. For more information click here.

Brigadoon as a Summer White House

The Coolidge homestead is such a throwback to the way Vermont used to be that some people call it “Vermont’s Brigadoon.”

Coolidge and his sons in Plymouth Notch, 1916

Coolidge expressed his feelings about his home state in an eloquent speech that followed the disastrous flood of 1927.

“I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the Union, and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.^”

Photo of the Thimble Islands by JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ, M.D. – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49575458.

This story about the summer White House in each state was updated in 2022.

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The Peculiar and Biting Calvin Coolidge Wit

The Calvin Coolidge wit was once described as ‘sharp and cold as a frost-etching on a windowpane.’

His humor completed his image as an old-fashioned Yankee. He was thrifty, puritanical, moralistic and he even did farm chores.

That image –Calvin Coolidge, wit and all — proved reassuring while people abandoned traditional values during the Roaring 20s.

Were they laughing at the Calvin Coolidge wit? Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The Calvin Coolidge Wit

Once, at a dinner party, the woman sitting next to him said she bet she could get more than two words out of him. Coolidge then famously responded: “You lose.”

In 1925, someone asked how it felt to be president of the United States. “Well,” he said, “You got to be mighty careful.”

Soon after Calvin Coolidge took office, he received his first paycheck, which delivered a messenger from the Treasury Department. Coolidge solemnly told him, “Call again.”

His supporter Frank Stearns, son of department store mogul R.H. Stearns, thought Coolidge probably inherited his brevity from his father. As an example, John Coolidge once received an invitation to attend a presidential event. He replied:

Dear Gentlemen,
Can’t come.
Thank you.
John Coolidge

Calvin, Jr., likely inherited the Calvin Coolidge wit. On the morning after his father took the oath of office as president in Plymouth Notch, Vt., he went to work bundling tobacco.

One of his co-workers said, “If my father were president, I wouldn’t be working in a tobacco field. Calvin replied, “If my father were your father you would.”

Calvin, Jr., died at 16 during his father’s presidency. His death caused Calvin Coolidge to fall into a deep depression. Even as president he suffered from intense social anxiety, and his son’s death exacerbated the problem.

Grace Coolidge

The vibrant, outgoing Grace Coolidge filled in her husband’s many silences.

Calvin and Grace Coolidge. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

She often told stories about the Calvin Coolidge wit.

On their return from their honeymoon. Coolidge handed her an old brown bag filled with 52 pairs of socks with holes in them. She asked him if he married her just to get his socks mended.

He told her, “No, but I find it mighty handy.”

Once as first lady, she and the president visited a government farm on separate tours. She came to the chicken yard and showed some interest in a prize rooster. The farmer told her the rooster could mate several times a day.

Mrs. Coolidge said, “Tell that to the president when he comes by.”

The farmer told the president. Coolidge asked, “Same hen every time?” The reply: “Oh, no, Mr. President, a different hen every time.”

Coolidge said, “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”

Arthur Cheney Train, who created the fictional character Ephraim Tutt, didn’t admire the Calvin Coolidge wit.

“He had a perverse streak that led him to do and say eccentric things which he did not intend to be funny at all,” wrote Train. Once in a while, for example, Coolidge would press all the buttons on his desk, causing bells to ring all over the White House and all the servants to come running — for the fun of it.

A Good Angleworm

As a student at Amherst College, he took his meals in a boardinghouse with his friend Dwight Morrow, whose daughter would marry Charles Lindbergh. Morrow said the landlady often served hash, which caused Coolidge to turn serious.

The landlady had a dog and a cat, Morrow said. Coolidge would ask “Where’s the dog?” and the dog would be brought in. Then he’d ask “Where’s the cat?” and the cat would be brought in.

Only then would he eat the hash.

“That’s a good angleworm,” was an example of the Calvin Coolidge wit. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

As president, he once presided over a tree-planting ceremony. He turned back the soil with a golden trowel, the Army and Navy bands stood waiting on cue, the crowd quietly anticipated Coolidge’s words.

The president stood silent until Supreme Court Chief Justice William Taft said, “Please say something.” Coolidge finally replied, “That’s a good angleworm.”

The Soul of Wit

Massachusetts Gov. Channing Cox, Coolidge’s former lieutenant governor, visited him at the White House. He complained that back home in Massachusetts he always had to see people and fought all the time to get some real work done.

Coolidge told him, “Channing, the trouble is you talk back.”

Coolidge once observed that what he didn’t say never hurt him.

At one White House press conference, reporters fired questions at him.

“Have you anything to say about Prohibition?”
“No.”
“Have you anything to say about the World Court?”
“No”
“About the farm situation?”
“No.”
“About the forthcoming senatorial campaign?”
“No.”

Then as the reporters filed out of the room, Calvin Coolidge finally called out, “And don’t quote me.”

This story was updated in 2023.

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Calvin Coolidge Takes the Oath of Office by the Light of a Kerosene Lamp

Calvin Coolidge, vice president of the United States, was vacationing with his wife at his family’s homestead in Plymouth Notch, Vt., on the night of Aug. 2, 1923, when his life suddenly changed.

President Warren G. Harding had died. And the manner in which Calvin Coolidge succeeded him that night — right down to his Puritanical treatment of the Bible — fit perfectly with his carefully cultivated image.

Calvin Coolidge, wearing a black armband for President Harding

As vice president, Coolidge didn’t have many official duties. He and his wife, Grace Goodhue Coolidge, joined the Washington social scene. He earned the nickname ‘Silent Cal’ from his sparse conversation at parties. According to one story, a woman sitting next to him at dinner said, “I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” He replied, “You lose.”

Calvin Coolidge

He had been born in the rear of the general store in the small village of Plymouth Notch on July 4, 1872. He came from old Puritan stock, and his family had deep roots in New England politics and farming. (You can watch him wield a pitchfork on this video here.)

Down on the farm.

Calvin Coolidge entered politics as a lawyer in Northampton, Mass., and rose to governor of the commonwealth. He rose to national prominence in 1919, when the Boston police force went on strike. Coolidge called up the National Guard, took control of the police department and fired the striking policemen.

It was a tumultuous time, when middle-class Americans feared the country was being overrun with immigrants, radicals and labor unions. Coolidge’s moralistic response reassured voters. “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time,” he said.

In 1920, Warren G. Harding picked Calvin Coolidge as his running mate. Harding then won a landslide victory as president of the United States.

Official portrait of President Calvin Coolidge

Oath of Office

Harding died suddenly in California on Aug. 2, 1923. Coolidge’s father, a notary public, awakened him and gave him the news. He also gave him the oath of office.

Scandal had marred the Harding administration. Coolidge’s reputation as a Puritan in Babylon would make him a popular president.

That reputation wasn’t an accident. Calvin Coolidge relied for a decade on a New York advertising man, Bruce Barton, to shape the public’s perception of him. Barton cast Coolidge as an old-fashioned Yankee farmer who would uphold moral standards in a decadent modern age.

Barton probably had a hand in Coolidge’s reminiscence of the night he took the oath of office — by kerosene lamp, with his wife, on his family farm. Calvin Coolidge described how he heard his father coming up the stairs, voice trembling. He narrated how his father handed him a report that President Harding had die. And he recounted how he knelt down and prayed, asking God to bless the American people.

Aug. 3, 1923

Here’s how Coolidge remembers that night:

My first thought was to express my sympathy for those who had been bereaved and after that was done to attempt to reassure the country with the knowledge that I proposed no sweeping displacement of the men then in office and that there were to be no violent changes in the administration of affairs. As soon as I had dispatched a telegram to Mrs. Harding, I therefore issued a short public statement declaratory of that purpose.

Calvin Coolidge Homestead

Meantime I had been examining the Constitution to determine what might be necessary for qualifying by taking the oath of office. It is not clear that any additional oath is required beyond what is taken by the vice president when he is sworn into office. It is the same form as that taken by the president.

Having found this form in the Constitution, I had it set up on the typewriter, and the oath was administered by my father in his capacity as a notary public, an office he had held for a great many years.

Calvin Coolidge, Puritan

Coolidge, a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee Puritan, didn’t put his hand on the Bible when he took the oath of office. Puritans in colonial New England objected to the practice because it gave a physical object the honor due only to God.

The oath was taken in what we always called the sitting room, by the light of the kerosene lamp, which was the most modern form of lighting that had then reached the neighborhood. The Bible which had belonged to my mother lay on the table at my hand. It was not officially used, as it is not the practice in Vermont or Massachusetts to use a Bible in connection with the administration of an oath.

Besides my father and myself, there were present my wife, Senator (Porter) Dale, who happened to be stopping a few miles away, my stenographer, and my chauffeur.

Plymouth Notch now belongs to the President Calvin Coolidge Homestead District. It includes more than a dozen buildings restored as closely as possible to the days when Coolidge lived there. It is a National Historic Landmark.

This story was updated in 2022.

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