The Silent Majesty of Plymouth
Notch
There are fewer people and cows,
but little else has changed in the home place of the
last U.S. president from Vermont.
By Robert Wilson
Ask William Jenney about the population
of Plymouth Notch, Vt., where he's lived and worked
for 15 years, and he'll tell you, "Technically,
it's just me and the Coolidges." The response
comes sunnily, but on this damp and gloomy early November
afternoon, you might well suppose that the Coolidges
he means are those supine ones across the road in
the Plymouth Notch Cemetery. Among the seven generations
of Coolidges lined up there in stern rows is one of
three Calvins, the 30th president of the United States,
though you wouldn't know it from his simple headstone.
No, Jenney is referring to some living Coolidges,
great-grandchildren of the president, who own a couple
of houses at the edge of the President Calvin Coolidge
State Historic Site, where Jenney is administrator.
The site, in the Green Mountains between
Rutland and Woodstock, contains two dozen buildings,
half of them open to the public, on 560 acres abutted
by the Coolidge State Forest. "Everything in
the line of sight from the center of the village is
protected," Jenney says.
I've come to Plymouth Notch on Election Day, seeking
the admittedly tangential historical thrill of being
in the hometown of the last president Vermont gave
the nation a year to the day before its best shot
in 81 years at contributing another. Low clouds behead
the mountains that surround the upland bowl of land
in which Plymouth Notch nestles; the clouds and the
cold drizzle they emit make the idea that has brought
me here seem particularly far-fetched. Even in these
Republican times, Coolidge (1872-1933) is not considered
one of your sexier presidents, and even on the glinting
fall afternoon I'd imagined for my visit, between
the leaf-viewing season and the skiing season at nearby
Killington, I might have expected the crowds to be,
at worst, manageable. Given the weather, and given
that the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic
Site is—if you want to be technical about this, too—closed
for the season, I'm the day's lone political pilgrim.
Still, the lone year-round resident
who accompanies me (since even the living Coolidges
don't really live here) knows his history and dispenses
it easily as we wander among the village's buildings.
The whole town is beautifully restored to or unchanged
from the August night in 1923 when Vice President Coolidge,
visiting his father in Plymouth Notch as he did each
summer, learned that his boss, President Warren G. Harding,
had gone to his Maker. Calvin's father, Colonel John
Coolidge, waked him with the news. Officials in Washington
had tried to call on the town's one phone, in the general
store across the street from Colonel John's white clapboard
house, but the storekeeper had not been roused by the
persistent ringing, so a messenger had been dispatched
from nearby Bridgewater, where the officials had reached
a telegraph operator. Although John was not really a
colonel, he was a notary public and was therefore qualified
to administer the presidential oath of office to his
son, which he did in his sitting room by the light of
a kerosene lamp at 2:47 a.m. on Aug. 3.
For more of this article, look for the January/February
2004 issue on newsstands, e-mail
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