For three and a half hours on the morning of Aug. 16, 1924, the president of the United States slept in a train car sitting on a railway siding in Ludlow. Calvin Coolidge was returning to his boyhood home in nearby Plymouth for two weeks of rest to escape the heat and pressures of Washington.
It was Coolidge’s third visit to Plymouth in the last year. He surely hoped this one would escape tragedy. During the first trip, in August 1923, Coolidge, then the vice president, had been awakened by his father, who told him that Warren G. Harding had died and he was now president. Coolidge had returned 11 months later to bury his younger son, Calvin Jr., who had died of blood poisoning after a blister became infected.
On the train car in Ludlow, barely a month after Calvin Jr.’s funeral, Coolidge, his wife, Grace, and their surviving son, John, woke early, ate breakfast, then were driven to Plymouth. Their motorcade traveled at 20 miles per hour — about half the top speed of a new Ford Model T, a relaxed speed which one newspaper reported was the president’s preferred rate. With them was a phalanx of Secret Service agents and journalists. As the caravan reached Plymouth, it didn’t turn left into the village. Instead it turned right, to stop at the cemetery, where the Coolidges paid their respects to Calvin Jr., as well as the president’s mother and sister.
When they reached the village, only about 50 people had turned out to witness the president’s arrival. Vermonters were seemingly caught off guard by his early-morning arrival, though newspapers had announced his general travel plans. Over the coming days, however, people from across the state and region would flock to Plymouth. The peace the president sought would only be preserved by the distance imposed by Secret Service agents.
The Coolidges stayed with the president’s father, John, whose house was just down the road from Florence Cilley’s General Store. Fifty-two years earlier, Coolidge had been born in a house attached to that store. Now a meeting hall above the store was serving as his presidential office. When reporters asked Coolidge’s secretary, C. Bascom Slemp, what the president’s plans were for his first days of vacation, he could provide few details. The president wanted to relax and visit with family and old friends, Slemp said. Coolidge could stay in touch with Washington, however, because telephone and telegraph lines had been strung to the meeting hall.
Despite the growing crowds, the Secret Service and state and county officials managed to keep order. A reporter for the Barre Times described how upon entering the village, a driver would encounter “a traffic officer (sometimes two when the congestion is the worst) silently wig-wagging the right of way. From the traffic officer at the corner the motorist is passed along by a beautiful system of handling until he finds himself and car parked in one of the pastures lining the little village.”
There wasn’t much to see in Plymouth, the reporter noted, just a few houses and the general store “unless one happens to turn his eyes sharply to the right, there to see a set of buildings up the street and a little church just opposite. This set of buildings up the street is the temporary White House of the country.”
The Coolidges attended services at the church on Sunday, Aug. 17. A couple hundred people packed the building to join them. Afterward, the Coolidges strolled to their temporary residence, while visitors to the village flocked to the general store and the just-opened tearoom and souvenir shop to buy postcards and other mementoes.
Coolidge tried to make his visit home as normal as possible, sitting around his father’s house reading or visiting with guests. Edward Blanchard, who owned a farm next to John Coolidge’s place, mentioned that he’d had trouble harvesting crops due to illness in the family. The president, who was free the next afternoon, volunteered to help.
Coolidge often did chores when visiting Plymouth. It probably reminded him of his childhood. But rain scrubbed the plans. Despite the normalcy Coolidge sought, he was living in a fishbowl. Secret Service agents set up a “dead line” 10 yards from the house, across which no one could cross without permission, the Rutland Herald wrote.
Wire service reporters were among those toeing the line. From them, Americans learned of the president’s latest activities, which, since this was a vacation, were limited. The public read that he huddled with Charles Dawes, his running mate in the upcoming fall elections; that he received briefings on the successful renegotiation of Germany’s reparations for its role in the Great War, and that he entertained inventors Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and tire magnate Harvey Firestone—the three recently having become traveling companions.
But the public wanted to know more, reported the Brattleboro Reformer. “A lot of people outside of Vermont are going to be disappointed if the newspaper men cannot report sometime during the next week or so that the president ate pie for breakfast,” the paper joked, pie for breakfast being considered the mark of a true Yankee.
Advisers suggested the president host a large field-day-style event, “with half the people of the state present as a tribute to their distinguished fellow-citizen,” the Herald reported, “but the quiet executive kibosh was placed on the publicity plan, just as several other similar plans were in the same fashion dropped at a word from him.”
Instead, Coolidge and his wife would host a simple public reception on his father’s lawn on Aug. 23. The event opened the floodgates. To accommodate the anticipated crowds, the state highway patrol made the road from West Bridgewater to Plymouth one way during the hours leading up to the event, then reversed the direction for the hours afterward. Thousands of cars poured down the little road and parked in fields surrounding the village. Estimates of the crowd ranged from 10,000 to 20,000.
Starting at 3 p.m., the president and first lady greeted a line of people that snaked through the village. “For two hours,” the Vermont Standard newspaper of Woodstock wrote, “the people continued to pass by to speak their carefully rehearsed words of greeting.” And afterward, they lingered as long as they could to watch “a scene as they knew they were not likely to see again.”
“The patriarchs of the State came to Plymouth,” the Standard continued. “The little children from miles around were brought up by their parents to tell their grandchildren some day of the time when they shook hands with Vermont’s president, Calvin Coolidge and his wife.”
Millworkers from Ludlow, fresh from the barber’s shop after their half-day’s work on Saturday, turned out, too. During the reception, the president’s father sat in a hammock on his porch, smiling at his famous son. It all must have seemed a blur to the Coolidges. At points, according to one estimate, the Coolidges were greeting 50 people a minute. At one point, Grace, who was known for her personable way, noticed a boy who had been rushed by too quickly to say hello. “She stopped him and shook his hand,” the Standard reported. “It wasn’t an exceptional incident. She did it a hundred times. She held up the line sometimes, and the secret service ushers had to speak to her about it.”
Grace was a natural with crowds, greeting many visitors by name. It must have been harder for the famously taciturn president. It was no less awkward for some of his old friends. “Few called the president ‘Cal,’ ” the Herald reported. “One man, after he had gone through the reception line, said that he had a hard time saying ‘Mr. President’ because he had known him all his life and always had called him ‘Cal.’”
The Coolidge’s ended their stay in Plymouth on Aug. 28. On their way out of town, they again visited the family gravesites, then made the 12-mile drive back to Ludlow to board the waiting train that would carry them back to Washington.
Each of the Coolidges would ultimately return to Plymouth Notch for good in their own time. When Calvin Coolidge died in 1933, just four years after leaving office, his body was brought back to Plymouth for burial in the family plot. His simple gravestone bears his name, his birth and death dates and the Seal of the President of the United States. Grace followed Calvin in 1957. John joined them decades later when he died in 2000 at the age of 93.
