COOLIDGE HOMESTEAD, PLYMOUTH, VT

The Coolidge Homestead in Plymouth Notch has no electricity switch to flip and, in August of 1923, no working telephone either. That’s precisely why what happened here at 2:47 in the morning on August 3rd still gets told in Vermont classrooms a century later: a father, acting in his lawful capacity as a notary public, swore his own son in as the thirtieth President of the United States by the light of a kerosene lamp, at the family’s own kitchen table, using the family Bible. Nobody planned it. Nobody rehearsed it. It’s still the quietest inauguration in American history.

John Calvin Coolidge Jr. was born just across the road from this house, above his father’s general store, on July 4, 1872 — the only U.S. president born on Independence Day. The family moved into the larger homestead when Calvin was a boy around 1876, and it’s this house, not the birthplace itself, that carries Plymouth Notch’s most famous night.

By the summer of 1923, Calvin Coolidge was Vice President under Warren G. Harding, and he’d come home to Plymouth Notch the way he did most Augusts — to help with haying and sit on the porch of the house he grew up in. There was no phone line reaching the homestead. Word of Harding’s sudden death in San Francisco on August 2nd had to reach him by a messenger in the dead of night .

Coolidge’s father, John Calvin Coolidge Sr., was a farmer, a store owner, and — critically, for what happened next — a notary public and justice of the peace. In the small hours of August 3rd, by the light of a single kerosene lamp because the house had no electricity either, he administered the presidential oath of office to his own son in the family’s sitting room, with Grace Coolidge and a small number of witnesses present, using the Coolidge family Bible. The clock in the room reads 2:47 when it happened, and Vermont has never quite let go of the detail. Coolidge later took a second oath from a federal judge in Washington, largely to settle any legal question about whether a state notary’s authority reached a federal office — but the version everyone remembers, the one that actually happened in real time, took place in this room.

Coolidge served until 1929, and if there’s a single line of his that belongs on a Vermont wall more than any other, it isn’t from that night — it’s from a speech he gave five years later, after floodwaters tore through the state in 1927: “Vermont is a state I love… I could not look upon the peaks of Ascutney, Killington, Mansfield and Equinox without being moved in a way that no other scene could move me. If ever the spirit of liberty should vanish from the rest of the Union, it could be restored by the generous share held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.” It’s arguably the more Vermont of the two — the oath made him president; this is the line that made him one of ours.

The Coolidge Homestead is preserved today largely as it stood that night, part of the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site alongside the general store, the family’s cheese factory. Nearby is the small Plymouth Notch cemetery where Coolidge is buried under a headstone marked with nothing but the presidential seal — no monument, no epitaph. Somehow, for a man they called “Silent Cal,” that fits.

There’s a Plymouth Vermont Photo T-Shirt in the Retro Design now, built from this image of Coolidge’s headstone in the same quiet Plymouth Notch that swore in a president by lamplight, now on a shirt.

🛍️ Plymouth Vermont Photo T-Shirt (Retro Design): https://shop.myhometownvermont.com/products/plymouth-vermont-photo-t-shirt-retro-design-b

🏠 Shop all Plymouth products: https://myhometownvermont.com/towns/plymouth/