Woodrow Wilson

📍2340 S Street NW, Washington, DC 20008, USA

“I grew up in Augusta, Georgia, and later Columbia, South Carolina, during the Civil War and Reconstruction, the son of a Presbyterian minister whose study was my first schoolroom; one of my earliest memories is hearing that Mr Lincoln had been elected and there would be war. I came to the White House as a scholar and left it in 1921 a broken man after a stroke, with my League of Nations rejected by the Senate. Edith and I chose this red-brick Georgian Revival house on S Street, in the quiet Kalorama neighbourhood, designed a few years earlier by the architect Waddy Wood; I bought it as a surprise for her. It was adapted around my illness, with an elevator and a balcony so I could avoid the stairs, and a large room was added for my eight thousand books. I was the only president of my era to stay on in Washington after leaving office. On Armistice Day crowds gathered in the street, and I came to the door to speak to them. Edith later gave the house and all its contents to the nation; it opened to visitors in 1963.”

Sources: woodrowwilsonhouse.org nps.gov Wikipedia: Woodrow Wilson House (Washington,_D.C.)