Dead Presidents

IN 1868, barely three years after Abraham Lincoln’s death and funeral, the Senate Committee on Territories suggested that the country establish the Wyoming Territory under a new name: Lincoln. “The high esteem in which he was held by the country, not only by his own party, but by the opposite party, suggested his name as a very appropriate one,” said Senator Richard Yates of Illinois. “I think the committee were unanimous in reporting the name of Lincoln instead of Wyoming.”

Yates was ready to let the change go forward; other senators weren’t so sure, noting that lawmakers had only once before named a territory after a president, and that was George Washington. “The example would be unfortunate to name States after our public men,” said Indiana’s Oliver P. Morton. “We have adopted the system . . . of naming the western and northwestern States after Indian tribes, or giving to them the same names that the Indians gave them, and in that way we have obtained beautiful names for nearly all the western States. I do not think a prettier name could be found than that of Wyoming, and for one I would prefer giving this Territory that name.” Lawmakers decided not to go with Lincoln after all.

Two decades later, though, Lincoln’s name was back before Congress, as a proposed alternate name for North Dakota. Several times legislators considered breaking Idaho up and mashing part of it together with pieces of other nearby states to make a State of Lincoln, with no success.

And that’s no knock on Lincoln—this country has loved naming things after him. There’s an Abraham Lincoln tomato variety, an asteroid called (3153) Lincoln, and the capital city of Nebraska. The first coast-to-coast highway system in America was the Lincoln Highway—“America’s Main Street,” as it was known in the early twentieth century. In 2012, firefighters outside the Clermont Presidents Hall of Fame, west of Orlando, rescued a three-week-old kitten stuck inside a statue of Abraham Lincoln; they named the little guy Abe.

The other presidents have done pretty well with names, too. Washington and Grant have their own asteroids, and Herbert Hoover has two. In 1920, (932) Hooveria was named by an Austrian astronomer “as a permanent memorial of the great help rendered to the people of Austria” by Hoover after World War I. An asteroid called (1363) Herberta came in 1938, in honor of the former president’s visit to Belgium.

There are four state capitals named for presidents—Jackson, Mississippi; Madison, Wisconsin; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Jefferson City, Missouri. George Washington is the namesake for the national capital, and he’s the only president with his own state, though there have been plenty of attempts to add other presidents to the ranks. Presidents’ names have been given to plenty of children as well: pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander and blues great Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Arthur Burnett) are among the best-known Americans named after our leaders, and there are plenty of lesser-known kids who have carried presidential names as well. As he returned home to Tennessee, Andrew Jackson carried 150 silver half dollars, to give to each child named for him or his late wife, Rachel. He was nearly out of half dollars by the end of the trip.

Some presidents end up as the namesakes for foods. In East Aurora, New York, outside of Buffalo, I stopped for coffee at a place called Taste. The menu there includes a sandwich called the Millard Fill-Me-More, which consists of “chicken salad with walnuts, cranberries, greens and red onions on a bistro blanket.” Recipes abound for president-themed dishes, like “puree of wild ducks Van Buren,” a rich French-style soup with a lot of duck, a little veal, and plenty of butter. And lots of desserts: Washington Pie (which is actually a pudding-filled cake), a pudding known as “Apricots with rice a la Jefferson,” and “Peach pudding à la Cleveland.” You could try some of the whiskey George Washington distilled at Mount Vernon, but if you indulge too heavily you might need to join the Washingtonians, an antidrinking movement in the mid-nineteenth century, which, much like Alcoholics Anonymous does today, encouraged the newly sober to attend regular meetings in which they shared personal addiction stories.

We can, on occasion, go a little overboard in naming things after a president, and we have to pull back. In 1901, shortly after the assassination of William McKinley, the Chautauquan reported that the United States had considered a proposal “to call the Philippine archipelago by the name of ‘The McKinley Islands.’” McKinley had pushed to annex the islands after the Spanish-American War, partly to keep them out of European hands and open to American trade routes, but also, as he told a group of ministers, to “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.” The idea was eventually dismissed as too ostentatious, and probably not very considerate to the Filipinos, either. “Surely McKinley himself would have been the first to raise his hand,” the Chautauquan added, “against a proffered honor which would change the map of the world and outrage the sensibilities of a long-suffering people.”

McKinley sites, as a general rule, go for size. The town of Niles, Ohio, where the president was born, built a huge Greek Revival memorial building that houses a museum on one side and the town library on the other. The center area is open-air and features a marble McKinley statue, surrounded by a “Court of Honor”—bronze busts of other prominent men of the day. McKinley has the largest monument on the grounds of the Ohio state capitol; while Grant, Hayes, and Garfield have to share a statue, McKinley gets to be out front by himself. Buffalo, New York, put up a giant white obelisk across from the towering Art Deco city hall to remember the president assassinated there. The base features ornately carved sleeping lions, said to represent strength, and one of the facets of the obelisk bitterly explains that the beloved McKinley was the “victim of a treacherous assassin who shot the president as he was extending to him the hand of courtesy.”

And then there’s his enormous tomb, in Canton, Ohio. “Other memorials have been of a local character,” wrote the Chautauquan, “but this is national in the interest it has excited. Indeed, it is more than this, for the American consular service throughout all the world reports practical financial sympathy from Americans abroad and from appreciative foreigners, who, even at long range, realized the worth of William McKinley as a man and magistrate.” Grant’s Tomb in New York is a larger building, but it’s on flat land. McKinley’s round, double-domed mausoleum is ninety-seven feet tall and built into the side of a massive hill, seventy-five feet higher than the surrounding area. Even William and Ida McKinley’s matching dark green sarcophagi are bigger than other presidents’ tombs, or at least taller: they sit high above visitors, on a ten-foot stand of black Wisconsin granite.

There are 108 steps from the parking area to the tomb, with a McKinley statue at the halfway point. When I visited, the vast majority of people on these stairs weren’t visiting the McKinleys; they were Cantonites looking to get in some exercise. If McKinley is up there watching, he must wonder why so many people come right up to the tomb without going in. I watched one woman trudge up and down, up and down, on an 85-degree day. “How many times do you do this?” I asked. “Ten times, every day,” she said. “I’ve been doing it eight years—it doesn’t get any easier.”

It takes considerably more than 108 steps to get to the top of what has long been the biggest McKinley memorial—a more-than-20,000-foot mountain, which happens to be the highest point in North America. Calling the giant Alaskan peak Mount McKinley, though, has irritated Alaskans for decades; they prefer the mountain’s Athabaskan name—Denali, or “the high one.”

McKinley’s name didn’t come up in reference to the high one until 1896, when a prospector named William Dickey came through the area. His name choice was little more than election-year politics. Dickey, like McKinley, wanted to keep gold as the basis of US currency—not a popular position in the American West, which was open to silver as well as gold. Dickey named the peak after the pro-gold candidate to boost McKinley’s campaign and slight the pro-silver prospectors.

By all rights the “Mount McKinley” name should have fallen away from the mountain after the election, given that Dickey “discovered” a peak that had already been found and named by Natives, Russians, the British, and even other American prospectors. None of them, though, wrote about what they saw in the New York Sun under the title “Discoveries in Alaska,” and so Dickey’s name stuck—especially after McKinley’s assassination five years later.

But 1901 was a long time ago. In the ensuing decades, William McKinley’s star faded, while Native voices grew more influential in Alaska. Yet the official name of the mountain remained Mount McKinley until President Obama moved to change it to Denali in 2015. This was mostly thanks to the process we use for naming natural features. Anyone who wants to name—or rename—a mountain, river, or other natural feature in this country has to go through the US Board on Geographic Names, on which representatives of numerous federal agencies work toward “uniform geographic name usage throughout the Federal Government.” “The board doesn’t try to dictate the name,” explains its executive secretary, Lou Yost; “it’s trying to standardize usage,” meaning that the board’s goal is to make sure the government’s maps all use the same names.

Yost says requests for commemorative names, such as for historic figures, tend to be recognized if there’s local buy-in around the name and the person being recognized has “a long-term or direct association with the feature being named.” Someone with “regional or national significance” can trump even that, though the board seems to emphasize local names when possible.

12. In 1896, a prospector named William Dickey named this mountain “Mount McKinley,” which annoyed Alaskans for decades.

Under this system, the name Denali wins, hands down. Alaskans had already voted to rename the peak, while McKinley’s direct connection to the mountain ended with the outspoken and somewhat presumptuous prospector who was passing through the area. But there was a catch here: “If a name for a geographic feature is pending before Congress,” explains Yost, “the BGN will not take action on it.” And for decades, the members of Congress who have represented Canton introduced legislation to keep McKinley’s name in place on the mountain. “We must retain this national landmark’s name,” Ohio representative Tim Ryan said in a statement accompanying his legislation, “in order to honor the legacy of this great American president and patriot.”

The bills don’t need to become law, or even come up for votes; they just needed to be in the hopper for the board to keep the Denali name issue in its “later” pile. “Some names will cause some emotions and some consternation,” Yost said of the McKinley/Denali standoff, “but I don’t think we’ve had any that have gone on this long.” It was a pretty ingenious strategy—if you’re from Ohio, that is. Alaskans, of course, found it pretty annoying and responded enthusiastically when the Obama Administration bypassed the stalemate and established Denali as the mountain’s only name.

But memorials tend to persist, if only because keeping the status quo is almost always easier than making a change. The northern California town of Arcata has a McKinley statue in the middle of a plaza, even though antiwar locals have compared him to Hitler. “The truth of McKinley is he’s just like any of the other people who throughout history caused mass destruction and death,” said Michael Schleyer, a resident who launched a petition drive in 2005 to dump the McKinley statue. Schleyer and other residents saw McKinley’s pro-imperialist, annexation-heavy foreign policy as exactly the wrong thing to honor. But the town government decided to, as one councilor put it, “grant McKinley amnesty,” in part because he would have cost too much to remove.

And so the statue is still there on H Street, still the target of Arcatans’ scorn—or, sometimes, worse: “On various occasions,” noted a news report around the time of the debate, “the distinguished sculpture has had a gas mask fitted over its head, cheese stuffed in its ears and condoms wrapped around its thumb.” The thumb itself went missing for a time—cut off from the rest of the statue. As Arcata officials considered replacement digits, the thumb reappeared; a local man said it had been handed to him by a stranger in nearby Clam Beach. The man alerted the authorities and collected a $500 reward. The thumb was reattached, and no charges were filed in its disappearance, but the Arcata Union reported that the man who turned in the thumb thief was arrested after what police called “a drunken brawl.” According to the paper, the man “claimed he’d been surrounded by pro-thumb theft vigilantes who called him a ‘snitch.’”

The way I see it, if a monument is surrounded by cheese, gas masks, and “pro-thumb theft vigilantes,” it’s probably going to stick around.

INERTIA MAY be enough to keep a statue in the ground, but it’s not going to make anybody care about the president on that statue. Doing that takes effort—like a movement across the country. Or, alternatively, a lot of little movements in different parts of the country.

This has been the idea behind the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project: rather than let the historic chips fall where they may and leave their man to inertia and thumb vandals, the project wants to keep Ronald Reagan and his ideals in front of the public by naming things for him. Lots of things. How many things? “We want one thing in each county,” says the project’s architect, Grover Norquist.

America has more than three thousand counties, so he’s talking about a lot of Reagan.

Norquist is as well suited as anybody for a grand-scale Reagan project: he’s the man behind the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, in which lawmakers, almost always Republican ones, promise to block any increase to any tax at any time. That pledge has certainly gone big; signing has been a virtual requirement for Republican candidates, who support the principle behind signing but also know that Norquist’s group, Americans for Tax Reform, can pit its considerable influence and resources against them if they don’t. Democrats by and large abhor the pledge and complain that Norquist has an “iron grip” on modern conservatives. One critic even called him the “dark wizard” of the right.^*

Call him what you want—Norquist has even called himself a “Darth Vader” for the cause at times—but it would be well off the mark to assume he’s just a heavy for tax cuts. The Legacy Project is pretty shrewd stuff, using a mostly nonpolitical appeal to advance political principles. “If you want to contend for the future,” Norquist said as the project got off the ground, “you have to contend for the public understanding of the past.” A big part of that understanding comes from naming things for public figures, and Reagan’s naming legacy was, at that point, pretty small. Meanwhile, he said, “everything that wasn’t nailed down was named for John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King or Franklin D. Roosevelt. Conservatives have not done as well in honoring their heroes.”

When Norquist started the Legacy Project in 1997, Ronald Reagan was still alive, albeit out of public view because of Alzheimer’s disease. And he’d been out of office for less than a decade. Memorials tend to take time, and, by definition, they come after a person’s death. Kennedy, King, and FDR had all been dead for decades, and each had died a very public, tragic death; a lot of the memorials that came after those deaths weren’t necessarily because of the subject’s political persuasions.

Then again, Roosevelt and Kennedy each ended up on a coin within the year after they died, so it is possible to put a memorial together quickly. And if memorials really do shape public perception, then Reagan, with maybe two dozen to his name, wasn’t set to shape much. Sure, the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington was the second-largest government building in the country when it was built, second only to the Pentagon, and the DC emergency room where the Secret Service took the president after the attempt on his life in 1981 had been renamed the Ronald Reagan Institute of Emergency Medicine. But such sites weren’t going to capture the public imagination like, say, the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial on the National Mall. And while the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home in Dixon, Illinois, is a fine place, the statue of Reagan in the side yard is as much about promoting the state’s industry as it is about the president’s legacy: “Illinois is famous for its production of agricultural products,” the statue’s information plaque says, “so it seems appropriate for him to be admiring the kernels of corn in his hand.”

Hence the effort to put a memorial in every county in the country. If Reagan’s legacy lagged in the public imagination, the thinking went, the conservative movement could lag, too. But if the public thought of Reagan, as Norquist did, as a top-tier historic figure, there would be a Reagan mantle for modern conservatives to claim as their own. As the former Legacy Project director Michael Kamburowski put it, “Someone 30 to 40 years from now who may never have heard of Reagan will be forced to ask himself, ‘Who was this man to have so many things named after him?’” The project website offers a “strategy guide” for choosing things to name, and it says participants should always keep an eye out for low-hanging fruit: “Many major landmarks and projects are named for physical geography, such as ‘Muddy Creek Elementary,’” it advises. “These are easy dedications.”

Norquist has often kept a big, high-profile naming opportunity on the table as well, because presidents don’t stay top tier solely as a namesake for previously unnamed muddy creeks. “Norquist had learned the lessons of [Reagan’s famous speeches at] Normandy and of the Brandenburg Gate,” says Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News; he wrote about the project in his book about Reagan, Tear Down This Myth. “Powerful symbols can mean a lot more than words.” The first symbol he chose in launching the initiative in 1997 was National Airport in Washington; he lined up support from then–House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Reagan’s son Michael, who called on Congress to “win just one more for the Gipper.”

Win they did, though not without opposition. Rep. James Oberstar, a Minnesota Democrat, complained Norquist and company wanted “to turn the airport into a political billboard to greet visitors to Washington.” The DC transit authority refused at first to spend money on maps with the new name. And then there was longtime New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who grumbled, “Washington National Airport is already named after a president—the first one.” Even some staunch Reaganites joined in the criticism; commentator George Will wrote there was “something un-Reaganesque about trying to plaster his name all over the country the way Lenin was plastered over Eastern Europe, Mao over China and Saddam Hussein all over Iraq.” Nevertheless, the bill passed the House and Senate handily in early 1998, and National Airport became known as Reagan National Airport.

However, opposition has stopped some of the Legacy Project’s bigger ideas. Grover Norquist called for Reagan to replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill. “I think it will pass very easily when Reagan passes away,” he said in 2001. “I’ve told the Bush [administration] to expect it.” But the effort stalled, even after Reagan’s death in 2004. Plan B, to put Reagan on the dime, had less support; even Nancy Reagan declared herself opposed to the idea. And Norquist’s wish for a Reagan Monument on the National Mall ground to a halt, ironically because of a bill President Reagan signed in 1986 barring any Mall memorials for people who hadn’t been dead for at least twenty-five years.

Sometimes the project has had to play defense. In 2013 the University of Chicago tore down an apartment complex in which Reagan had lived as a preschooler, despite calls from a group of community activists to turn it into “a museum and center.” The preservationists proposed a pretty colorful alternative: “Break the walls, floors, ceiling and fixtures of the Reagan family apartment into small fragments and sell them on the Internet for between $100 and $1,000 a chip, depending on the size,” suggested a board member of the Hyde Park Historical Society in a letter to the university’s newspaper. “This should raise many thousands of dollars for the university, rather like selling fragments of the True Cross.” It didn’t happen, but not for lack of enthusiasm among the pro-Reagan contingent.

And in the southern California town of Temecula, about an hour north of San Diego, a Reagan statue almost went up in flames. As president, the Gipper liked to tell the story of the town’s park—built entirely without public funding or assistance—as an example of what citizens could do without relying on government. Temecula, in response, named the place the Ronald Reagan Sports Park, complete with a Reagan statue. In 2013 someone set the thing on fire, charring the statue and destroying tiles displaying a quote in which Reagan exhorted Temecula to “never lose that spirit” of private-sector freedom and initiative.

More recently the Legacy Project has been on the hunt for a mountain peak on which to hang the Reagan name. In 2003 New Hampshire approved a bill to change the name of Mount Clay, in the White Mountains, to Mount Reagan, but the federal government said no, because of a policy about not naming things after people who hadn’t been dead five years; when they tried again years later, the feds said no again because of local resistance to the change. A Legacy Project supporter in Nevada, Chuck Muth, had better luck in his state: he found an unnamed mountain in a mountain range east of Las Vegas, cultivated local support, and even found local connections. (“Reagan was a marquee performer on the Las Vegas Strip for two weeks in 1954,” Muth told the Atlantic in 2013. “He owed back taxes to the IRS and needed the money. He also filmed a World War II propaganda film with Burgess Meredith at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.”) But just as the Board on Geographic Names looked set to act on the proposal, a Democratic member of Congress filed a bill to name that mountain after a Nevada lawmaker, blocking the board from taking action just as Ohioans had done so many times to those who wanted to pull William McKinley’s name from Denali in Alaska.

Muth has decided to start again with a different mountain in the same range. “It’s not the highest peak,” he said, “but it’s certainly close enough.” Maybe someday he’ll get Ronald Reagan’s name on a mountain. His effort, like many of the Legacy Project’s initiatives, has ebbed and flowed. There are hundreds of Reagan memorials on the map now, from Ronald W. Reagan Middle School in Grand Prairie, Texas, to Ronald Reagan Boulevard in Warwick, New York, to the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile Site in Cooperstown, North Dakota. But there are still more than two thousand Reagan-less counties, too. Sometimes the Legacy Project aims for a high-profile naming opportunity like the $10 bill; other times it lies low and just reminds supporters to celebrate Reagan’s birthday each February.

Even in quiet periods, though, Grover Norquist keeps an eye out for a good opportunity. Shortly after the US Patent and Trademark Office canceled the Washington Redskins’ federal registrations for being “disparaging to Native Americans,” sports fans started thinking up new names for the team—including the Washington Reagans. “Great idea,” Norquist told Buzzfeed. “The former Redskins can be the Ronald Reagans on winning years and the Nancy Reagans on losing years. Unless that gets us in more trouble elsewhere.”

Whether or not Reagan gets a football team named for him, or a mountain, or a $10 bill, the ongoing effort to name things after him will at least ensure he lingers in the public imagination, even as other modern presidents fade. In 2000, when the Legacy Project was just a few years old, Gallup Poll respondents ranked Reagan as a better-than-average US president; today, he usually ranks near the top, with John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. There’s a partisan divide in these polls—more than half of Republican respondents choose Reagan, while Democrats give Kennedy a boost—but the poll numbers echo Norquist’s hope that Reagan could be a conservative hero in the public’s eyes as Kennedy had been for progressives. Ronald Reagan remains, as the Legacy Project had hoped, a big deal.

Almost too big a deal, in fact. In 2012, rumors were flying at the Republican National Convention that a “special guest” on the schedule would be a 3-D hologram version of the Gipper, much like the hologram Tupac Shakur that had “performed” onstage at Coachella earlier in the year. Yahoo! News found a man called Tom Reynolds, who said he’d been developing a hologram version of the Great Communicator, but ran into opposition from Republicans “who asked him to delay the project out of concern it would overshadow Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech.” “Even in a hologram form,” Reynolds said, “I think Reagan’s going to beat a lot of people in terms of communicating.”

THERE’S NO question there’s an overtly political element to the Reagan Legacy Project, but it’s hardly the first time someone’s tried to name something after a president for political reasons; in fact, the project’s playbook isn’t that different from the one liberals used in the 1930s to memorialize Thomas Jefferson. The Sage of Monticello’s brand of rural individualism fell out of favor after the Civil War, in which Lincoln mobilized a strong central government to keep the country together. But in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt and his allies played up Jefferson as a champion of the little guy, a president who stood up for the people against the powerful. Jefferson’s face first showed up on the nickel in 1938, and FDR dedicated the Jefferson Memorial the following year, saying, “He lived, as we live, in the midst of a struggle between rule by the self-chosen individual or the self-appointed few.” Like the Legacy Project’s image of Reagan, this version of Jefferson wasn’t always a perfect historic fit, but the politics worked extremely well.

Jefferson has also been used as a symbol by people with very different politics than New Deal Democrats. Several times people in rural northern California have proposed pulling the region out of the Golden State and creating a new, libertarian-themed State of Jefferson with equally rural southern Oregon. “The Jefferson statehood tale appeals to a fantasy Westerners embrace,” says journalist Peter Laufer, who’s written about the movement. “We’re rugged individualists who like to go it alone.” And who better to stand as a symbol of that spirit than the most prominent voice for agrarian-style small government?

Ronald Reagan himself made a point of honoring a president for political purposes. Shortly after becoming president, he moved a portrait of New Deal icon Harry Truman out of the Cabinet Room and replaced it with one more in line with the more conservative goals he had in mind: Calvin Coolidge. Silent Cal was, as his biographer Amity Shlaes described him, the Great Refrainer of the American presidency, the guy who would rather get rid of a single bad law than pass twenty good ones. He was known for being frugal with words—the famous Coolidge quote is the one in which a woman tells Cal she made a bet she could get more than two words out of him, and he answers, “You lose.” But he was even more frugal with the federal budget, cutting back everything he could, and then trying to cut more. The portrait change was Reagan’s way of saying which president he hoped to emulate.

As a dead president, though, the Great Communicator and the Non-Communicator couldn’t be more different. The Legacy Project wants to turn Reagan into the country’s most memorialized president, while Calvin Coolidge fought the hardest against monuments in his own name. “It is a great advantage to a President,” he wrote in his autobiography, “and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know he is not a great man.” This wasn’t just talk, either: a wealthy supporter offered to build him a large, imposing marble tomb; Coolidge said no.

Even death itself was quiet when it came for Calvin Coolidge. In early 1933, just four years after he left the White House, Coolidge had a heart attack at home, alone, with no reported last words. Upon hearing that Coolidge was dead, the writer Dorothy Parker cracked, “How can you tell?” The answer could be found in his characteristically thrifty arrangements: Coolidge’s will was just twenty-three words long, and his funeral ceremony lasted a mere five minutes.^† Instead of a showy gravesite that drew attention toward him, Coolidge chose burial at the hilltop cemetery where his family had been buried for four generations. His tombstone is no bigger than anyone else’s; its only nod to notability is a presidential seal carved into the top. It’s simple, elegant, and perfect for its occupant: “There was a case for monuments to other presidents,” Shlaes wrote. “But the best monument to his presidency was no monument at all.”

Or maybe there’s a monument for Coolidge, too—just not the usual kind. One that’s got a lot more cheese in it than the others. Just down the road from Coolidge’s grave in Vermont is the village of Plymouth Notch. Getting here means driving on some winding roads next to the towering, tree-covered Green Mountains; it looks like what people outside New England think all of New England looks like. Not that the people who lived there in Coolidge’s day had time to look up and enjoy it: snowstorms could cut the village off from the rest of civilization for days back then. People had to be able to rely on themselves. “The neighborhood around The Notch was made up of people of exemplary habits,” the president wrote in his autobiography. “The break of day saw them stirring. Their industry continued until twilight.” Or, sometimes, later: in 1923, then–Vice President Coolidge learned during a visit to his father’s house that President Warren Harding had died. Coolidge took the oath of office by lamplight at 2:47 a.m., with his notary public father, “Colonel” John Coolidge, presiding. Having done what they needed to do, both men returned to bed.

Most of the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site is dedicated to preserving Plymouth Notch as Coolidge remembered it: the combination general store and post office, the post-and-beam barn with farm implements of all kinds (including my son’s favorite, “Tread Mill for a Horse”), the intimate wooden Congregational church. There’s actual industry going on today as well; back behind the Coolidge house, there’s a large white building marked THE PLYMOUTH CHEESE CORP. “Colonel” John Coolidge was one of several local farmers who started the cheese operation in 1890, mostly so their surplus milk didn’t go to waste. The company went under during the Great Depression, but President Coolidge’s son, also named John, revived it in the 1960s and eventually sold it to the state.

The door to this building will take you straight to a cheese case if you just want to buy, but to the left are big picture windows through which visitors can see the Plymouth Cheese Company in action. If you spot a bearded guy dipping blocks of cheese into melted wax, or stirring rennet into big silver vats full of raw milk, you might be looking at Jesse Werner, the artisan behind Plymouth Notch’s artisan cheese. This native Vermonter grew up on land that focused on the state’s other food group—maple syrup—but says it was cheese that always captured his imagination: “I thought, How can I be here and make this work for me?” The answer didn’t come for some time; Werner first headed to Europe to earn an MBA and sample the continent’s many cheese varieties. But it became clear once he returned to his native state to take courses at the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese. Vermont was looking for a cheesemaker to take over the operation at Plymouth Notch. “I was excited about the possibilities,” Werner told the Boston Globe. “I really wanted to re-create that early cheese from 1890, to abide by the recipe and try to reposition and rebrand Plymouth cheese.”

13. In 1890, Calvin Coolidge’s father helped to found the Plymouth Cheese Company (pictured here seventy-five years later, in 1965), which produces artisan cheese on the grounds of the Coolidge State Historic Site in Vermont.

Re-creating early cheese means Werner and his colleagues use techniques more in line with the antique equipment in the cheese company’s second-floor museum than the newer equipment in the production area. Plymouth cheese is made with older, English-style techniques that can’t be rushed along, and traditional Plymouth cheese ages for at least ten months before it can be sold. It’s not easy starting a business if you can’t sell your product for nearly a year, and even now, years later, Werner’s workweek can sometimes last six or even seven days. But the hard work is worth it: the Plymouth cheese process gives the end product a smooth, almost buttery texture, not as crumbly as regular cheddar and, for my tastes, even more delicious. Werner has won awards in some high-profile cheese competitions, and his products have ended up in some of Manhattan’s finest shops, as well as the excellent grilled cheese sandwiches at the Wilder House restaurant, also on the grounds of the historic site.

When you see Werner and his cheesemakers at work, you see the “exemplary habits” that Calvin Coolidge praised in the nineteenth-century people of Plymouth Notch—patience, dedication, industry, respect for tradition. “Not only do you get to see history, you get to taste and touch and smell it,” Werner says of the cheese operation. “It’s almost like the cheese is an historical exhibit.”

If it’s wrong to think this cheese is a perfect monument to a president, then I don’t want to be right.

^* Grover Norquist gets his first name from a Democratic president, as the grandfather for whom he was named got his own name from Grover Cleveland. When the media brings this up, Norquist notes that Cleveland was the last fiscally conservative Democrat to win the White House—or as he puts it, “He was a good Democrat.”

^† The will of Calvin Coolidge, in full: “Not unmindful of my son John, I give all my estate both real and personal to my wife Grace Coolidge, in fee simple.”