Plymouth Notch, where President Calvin Coolidge grew up, still looks much as it did a century ago, with homes, barns, a church, a one-room schoolhouse and a general store gracefully arrayed among old maples on a bucolic hillside. Nowadays, a historical museum tells the tale of Coolidge's life and times, while displays of tools for blacksmithing, woodworking, butter making and hand laundering are indicative of the hard work and grit it took to wrest a living from these stony pastures.
In 1923, Coolidge was sworn in as president here in the family farmhouse by his father, under the glow of a kerosene lamp in the wee morning hours, after receiving a telegram announcing the assassination of Warren Harding.