📍117 South Hervey Street, Hope, AR 71801, USA
1946 – 1950“Bill Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III in Hope, Arkansas, in August 1946, three months after his father was killed in a car accident. His first home was this two-storey white house at 117 South Hervey Street, built in 1917 and bought in 1938 by his grandparents, Eldridge and Edith Cassidy. When he was a toddler his mother, Virginia, went to New Orleans to train as a nurse anaesthetist so she could support them, and for those years his grandparents raised him. Hope was a small railroad and watermelon town in the piney southwest of Arkansas. His grandmother was strict and ambitious for him, teaching him to read and count at the kitchen table with flashcards. His grandfather ran a small grocery store, where Clinton later recalled him serving Black and white customers alike and extending credit to anyone who needed it, at a time when the South was rigidly segregated. He said the kindness he saw there was one of the first lessons that shaped his politics. He also remembered visiting his mother in New Orleans, and her kneeling at the railway station, crying, as he and his grandmother left. In 1950 his mother married Roger Clinton, and the family soon moved on, eventually to Hot Springs. But Hope stayed the emotional root of his story, and in 1992 he spoke of still believing in a place called Hope. The house is now a National Historic Site run by the National Park Service, furnished as it was in his early years.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today