The President Schlepped Here: 7 Surprising Presidential Sites

As we celebrate President’s Day, let’s take a moment to remember that not all of their historic sites are marble columns and heroic statuary.

1. Lincoln’s Turkey

Hartford, CT

Among the 100 or so insurance companies based in Hartford, Connecticut, is Lincoln Financial Group. In 2005, they began erecting sculptures — both abstract and realistic — along the Connecticut River, honoring the legacy of the President for whom the company is named.

You’ll nod in recognition as you stroll along the waterfront, admiring the statues of Abe as a young man, Abe meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, and an emancipated enslaved family. But you might stop short at a squat, smooth, almost pear-shaped statue of a turkey.

This is Jack, the first Thanksgiving turkey ever pardoned by a president.

The story goes that Abe Lincoln’s son Tad begged his father not to have that year’s turkey slaughtered, because he had adopted as a pet. Ever the indulgent dad, Lincoln wrote out a “pardon” for the bird and had Tad present it to the White House chef.

Jack was saved, Tad was happy, and a new White House tradition was born.

2. Barack Obama’s Two Baskin-Robbins Scoops

Honolulu, HI
Chicago, IL

It is hard to imagine a more ordinary-looking ice cream store than the one plunked down along King Street in Honolulu. And there was probably nothing remarkable about the high schooler named Barry who got his first job there in the 1970s.

Decades later, President Barack Obama returned to that modest storefront for a creamy trip down memory lane.

“Rock-hard ice cream can be brutal on the wrists,” he wrote. “I was less interested in what my job meant for my future and more concerned with what it meant for my jump shot.”

Obama left Hawaii, but he wasn’t done with Baskin-Robbins. Not many years later in Chicago, he bought a cone for a young woman named Michelle, sat with her on the curb outside the store — and stole their first kiss.

“It tasted like chocolate,” he recalled. There’s a plaque there now, at 53rd and South Dorchester.

3. The House that Millard Fillmore Built

East Aurora, NY

Abe Lincoln wasn’t the first president born in a log cabin. That humble honor goes to none other than Millard Fillmore, the obscure 13th president whose support for the Missouri Compromise held off the clouds of Civil War, but ironically also made that war virtually inevitable.

Fillmore and his wife lived in this house, near Buffalo, in the late 1820s — and it’s the only existing home built by a President with his own two hands.

Talk about modest: Although the clapboard house has two levels, it’s only 1-1/2 stories high. The upper floor has a low, basement-like ceiling that’s only half as high as the first floor’s.

 

4. Lincoln Stares Down Douglas: Debate Square

Freeport, IL 

In 1858, a young Republican upstart named Abraham Lincoln had the audacity to challenge incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas to a series of seven debates, one of which was held in what is now bucolic Debate Square in Freeport, Illinois.

Douglas won the election, but Abe is definitely the big winner in artist Lily Tolpo’s sculpture commemorating their face-offs. Even seated, 6-foot-4 Abe threatens to dwarf 5-foot-4 Douglas.

5. McKinley Memorial Street Median

Buffalo, NY 

In 1901, grieving Americans lined the railroad tracks from Buffalo to Washington, D.C. — then from D.C. to Canton, Ohio — to pay their last respects to President William McKinley, who had been fatally shot at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.

But how soon they forget. Today the site of the shooting is marked only by a bread box-sized rock set in a grassy median along a residential street.

6. FDR’s Memorial “Desk”

Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

One day in the Oval Office, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter asked President Franklin Delano Roosevelt what kind of memorial he’d want some day. “I know exactly,” FDR said, placing one hand on his desk. “I should like it to consist of a block about the size of this, and placed in the center of that green plot in front of the Archives Building.”

Twenty years after his death, a group of FDR administration veterans made it happen. Today, while more than two million tourists a year visit the sprawling 1997 FDR Memorial across town, the original, simple monument envisioned by the man himself remains, surrounded by flowers on a street corner.

7. The Train Where Truman Trolled The Press

Gold Coast Railroad Museum, Miami, FL

In the decades before Air Force One, Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower crisscrossed the country in this Pullman car, lavishly appointed for the chief executive’s comfort. It was also heavily armored with walls clad in 5/8th-inch steel and three-inch-thick windows. Plus, there were two escape hatches (just like on President Harrison Ford’s fictional Air Force One!).

You’ve seen this train before, in one of the most famous news photos of the 20th century: It was on the rear observation platform that Truman flashed his million-dollar smile and held aloft the Chicago Tribune’s most ill-conceived headline ever: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”