Being in Rutland, Vermont, mere miles away from the Coolidge Homestead in Plymouth Notch, brings thoughts of the President and First Lady who were native Vermonters. Calvin Coolidge, a Phi Gamma Delta, and Grace Goodhue Coolidge, a Pi Beta Phi, spent their formative years in Vermont. Calvin attended Amherst College; Grace graduated from the University of Vermont. The couple met in Northampton when Grace was teaching at the Clarke School for the Deaf and Calvin was a lawyer.
Calvin Coolidge State Forest is in the area and the library at Castleton State College is named in his honor. Some of the doors in the hotel in which I stayed had pictures of the Coolidges on a train leaving Rutland after he took the oath of office in the parlor of his father’s home.
The Coolidges married in the Goodhue family home in Burlington (the home is now part of Champlain College). Although they spent their married life living in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. , Vermont seemed to be always in their hearts.
In September of 1928, the Coolidges traveled to Vermont to survey damage from the prior year’s devastating flood. They stayed at the Coolidge homestead in Plymouth Notch and visited family graves, including the one of their son Calvin, Jr. who died at age 16 in July, 1924. At the last train stop in Vermont, the President spoke eloquently and from the heart:
Vermont is a state I love. I could not look upon the peaks of Ascutney, Killington, Mansfield, and Equinox, without being moved in a way that no other scene could move me. It was here that I first saw the light of day; here I received my bride, here my dead lie pillowed on the loving breast of our eternal hills.
I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the Union, and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.
The Calvin Coolidge Library at Castleton State College.
© Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2013.
