Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb__ A Tour of Presidential Gravesites - Brian Lamb [54]
From Rutland, Vermont: Make a right turn onto Route 7 South; travel approximately three miles and turn left onto Route 103. Go sixteen miles, then turn left onto Route 100 North. Travel approximately nine miles to Plymouth, and turn right onto Route 100A. Travel one mile and you will see a sign for the Calvin Coolidge Historic Site on the left.
From Long Island, Connecticut and Western Massachusetts: Take I-95 North to I-91 North to exit 6 at Rockingham, Vermont. Travel north on Route 103 through Chester and Ludlow to Route 100 North. Proceed north on Route 100 for approximately nine miles to Plymouth, then turn right onto Route 100A. Travel one mile and you will see a sign for the Calvin Coolidge Historic Site on the left.
From Boston and Rhode Island: From the Boston area, take I-93 North to Concord, New Hampshire. Just south of Concord take I-89 North to exit 1 in Vermont/Route 4 West for Woodstock-Rutland. Follow Route 4 to Route 100A, approximately eighteen miles. At Bridgewater Corners, turn left and follow 100A for approximately eight miles. You will see a sign for the Calvin Coolidge Historic Site on the right.
Once inside the cemetery, follow signs to President Coolidge’s gravesite.
For additional information
President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site
P.O. Box 247
Plymouth, Vermont 05056
Phone: (802) 672-3773
Fax: (802) 672-3337
www.historicvermont.org/coolidge
“…the recently opened papers of White House physician Joel Boone reveal just how great a toll the presidency exacted on Coolidge…”
—Richard Norton Smith
Nothing in his subsequent behavior was so revealing as Coolidge’s conduct on that sultry night in August 1923, when Warren Harding died in a San Francisco hotel room and the new president was sworn into office by his seventy-two-year-old father, a Vermont notary public. Before setting out for Washington the next morning, Coolidge, a deeply sentimental man, visited the hillside cemetery where five generations of his family lay buried. He paused before the grave of his mother. Hers was the first picture he placed on his White House desk; he would carry her likeness with him until the day of his own death.
Exploding the myth of a do-nothing president who slept away his term, the recently opened papers of White House physician Joel Boone reveal just how great a toll the presidency exacted on Coolidge, who never recovered from the 1924 death of his namesake son. As he wrote in his spare yet revealing autobiography, when young Calvin died, he took the glory and the power of the presidency with him. “The ways of Providence are often beyond our understanding,” Coolidge added, in a Job-like cry of despair. “I do not know why such a price was exacted for occupying the White House.”
Plymouth Cemetery is part of the Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site
Six generations of the Coolidge family are buried on this Vermont hillside
Informed that ex-president Coolidge was dead in January 1933, Dorothy Parker famously wisecracked, “How can you tell?” H.L. Mencken responded differently. With the perspective of time, Mencken had come to reconsider his scathing criticism of the Coolidge presidency. Contrasting Coolidge with Wilson “the World Saver” and Hoover “the Wonder Boy,” Mencken anticipated the revisionist scholarship of post-Reagan America. Should the day ever dawn, said the Sage of Baltimore, “when Jefferson’s warnings are heeded at last, and we reduce government to its simplest terms, it may very well happen that Cal’s bones now resting inconspicuously in the Vermont granite will come to be revered as those of a man who really did the nation some service.”
Not a bad epitaph for one whose first thought on being roused from bed in the middle of the night and thrust into the presidency was “I believe I can swing it.”
—RNS
Herbert Hoover
Buried: Herbert Hoover Library and Birthplace, West Branch, Iowa
Thirty-first President - 1929-1933
Born: August 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa
Died: October 20, 1964, in New York,