Like most American holidays, President's Day is now a largely commercial event -- with "silver dollar shopping days," supposedly honoring George Washington's coin toss across the Potomac, and stores "chopping prices" to commemorate his legendary refusal to lie about axing down a cherry tree. In his day, however, Washington's February 22 birthday was celebrated in earnest across the land, with "birthnight balls" and pub parties honoring the popular first president. The nation likewise venerated Lincoln in 1865, mourning his assassination by recognizing his birthday on February 12th -- a tradition that held until 1971, when the third Monday of February was designated a federal holiday, in honor of all past presidents.
If you pine for the days when commanders in chief were the kind of men whose birthdays inspired nationwide festivity and observance, why not use this President's Day weekend, February 19 to 21, to visit the homes of the innovators who shaped the nation? You could really get carried away, with the number of presidential memorials, libraries, graves, and homes preserved by the National Park Service. (A case in point: The Wood family, of San Jose, California, took two full weeks in 2001, to visit 37 presidential libraries, museums, gravesites, and landmarks in 18 states -- a course that spanned a distance of 5,600 miles. While we don't necessarily recommend following in their footsteps, the chronicles of their adventure are a fun read (www2.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/trip2001/index.html).
What we're suggesting here is tours of a few sites honoring the most widely esteemed presidents. The two most impressive homesteads, Washington's Mount Vernon and Jefferson's Monticello -- both designed, at least in part, by the amateur architect-presidents who inhabited them -- are close enough to make for a full long weekend, with the Lincoln Memorial not too far away on the Capitol Mall.
The privately run Mount Vernon Estate & Gardens (3200 George Washington Memorial Parkway, Mount Vernon, Virginia, 22121; no phone; www.mountvernon.org), commands a bluff overlooking the Potomac River, 16 miles outside the capital city that bears the first president's name. Washington inherited the six-room main house, which dates back to the 1730s, from his half brother Lawrence Washington in 1754. Over the years, he designed his own additions, resulting in the 20-room, 2-1/2-story mansion visitors know today. Most notable among his additions are the piazza overlooking the river and the cupola, which cooled the house in summer and proffered views of the expansive grounds.
Before Washington was called to command the army in 1775, he worked as a farmer at Mount Vernon, on what was originally 8,000 acres of land. Most everything the Washingtons needed was grown or made on the premises, with kitchen gardens, an orchard, a shoemaker's shop, a gristmill, a distillery, and more. With its wooded border, meadows, pleasure gardens, a park between the house and the river, and Washington's grave, the grounds are every bit as remarkable as the house itself. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger called Mount Vernon, "the most influential 18th-century house in America, and one of the greatest. . . . It is integrated into the landscape more seamlessly than any other house of its time, and it combines grandeur and intimacy in a way that no house has done before."
The George Washington Parkway links Mount Vernon with Washington, D.C. Mount Vernon is open every single day of the year; admission is $11; children 6-11 are $5; children under 5 are free. The website is excellent, with panoramic tours of every room. (All the presidential websites mentioned here are very good, with panoramic tours of the properties.)
If you're in New York, or can make it there more easily than D.C., try investigating "George Washington: Man, Myth, Monument," through February 27, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (tel. 212/535-7710; www.metmuseum.org). The exhibition features six dozen works in all media depicting Washington as general, president and, in posthumously created work, sentimentalized American hero. The show is a companion exhibition to "Gilbert Stuart" (the painter most famous for his portrait of Washington), also at the Metropolitan, but only through January 16.
Thomas Jefferson's Monticello (no address; tel. 434/984-9800 or 434/984-9822; www.monticello.org), commonly known as his "autobiographical masterpiece," is the only house in the U.S. to make UNESCO's roster of World Heritage sites. Yet the home's exquisite proportions and sublime vantage, on the hill that was Thomas Jefferson's favorite retreat as a boy, are almost diminutive in person, compared to the neoclassical icon that spreads across the five-cent piece. What's more surprising is that the stuff of the interiors is so idiosyncratic, compared with the symmetries of the house design, and more of a testament to the third president's spirit of experimentation than to his reverence for classical proportions and balance.
Right away, in the entrance hallway, guests are met -- as they were in Jefferson's day -- by trophies from Jefferson's travels and jerry-rigged devices of his own invention. A clock he designed for a home in Philadelphia now hangs in Monticello because the ropes on the cannonball-like weights that drive the clock, when they arrived, were far too long for the client's home. So Jefferson kept them and created a clock for himself that would mark time across the entire plantation (the chimes, made with a Chinese gong, reportedly could be heard by slaves three miles away). To accommodate the long ropes, he simply cut a hole in the floor so, to this day, they drape into the basement. Animal skins hang over the balcony rail in the entrance hall, along with Jefferson's collection of Native American artifacts. Gilbert Stuart mixed the paint for the green floor, which Jefferson took pains to liken unto the color of grass. The house is full of innovations by Jefferson, who at one time oversaw the U.S. Patent Office: a fireplace altered to burn wood instead of coal, his copying machine, microscopes, telescopes, mirrors used to maximize natural light, dumbwaiters, and alcove beds with closets above, reached by ladders.
The final leg of a trip to Monticello, a tour of the "Plantation" (read: slave quarters) is necessarily disturbing. Since DNA testing made Jefferson's relationship with slave Sally Hemmings an incontrovertible fact to be reckoned with, tour guides began addressing the issue -- not in the house, mind you, but along the tiny strip of land where the slave shacks used to stand. After the tour, during which the docent spares no gory details about the bleak existence of slaves on this plantation, visitors are asked to re-evaluate their estimation of Jefferson the man. The larger, more critical question, however, regards our legacy as a nation -- in that the liberties of the majority were bound to the enslavement of a few so inextricably and brutally it would almost have to take centuries to unravel the injustice. The physical evidence of this, at the hand of the great man whose name is synonymous with freedom, as author of the Declaration of Independence, will haunt for days.
Monticello is in the Virginia Piedmont, 125 miles from Washington, D.C., and 2 miles southeast of Charlottesville, on the Thomas Jefferson Parkway (Route 53). The Jefferson Library (www.monticello.org/library/index.html) is also on the premises, with unpublished reports, photographs, archives, and other rare items. Through February 28, the complex is open from 9am-4:30pm. Open seven days a week year-round except Christmas. Admission is $14; kids 6-11 are $6; kids under 6 are free.
Abraham Lincoln, the president capable of the most elegant sentences, had the most inelegant home of the major commanders in chief -- perhaps due to the 16th president's humble roots and his having lived in an age of Victorian excess. The Lincoln Home National Historic Site (413 S. Eighth St., Springfield, IL 62701-1905; tel. 217/492-4241 ext 221; www.nps.gov/liho), run by the National Park Service, is a cramped cacophony of clashing patterns and textures: floral wallpapers do battle with busy printed curtains and geometric-designed floors; it's a wonder the president could think straight. Admission is free, at the request of the Lincoln family.
The better tribute seems to be back in Washington -- Pierre L'Enfant's Abraham Lincoln Memorial, on the West end of the Mall, between the Capitol Building and the Potomac. Modeled after a Greek temple, with 36 Doric columns, for the number of states at the time of Lincoln's death, the structure shelters the famous Daniel Chester French sculpture of Lincoln. Lincoln's most immortal words -- from the Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural Address -- are inscribed on the walls outside, shaming what passes as presidential speechwriting today.
Indeed, the altogether fitting and proper tribute to Lincoln is to spend time with his words. They ring simple and no less true in this far more complicated and cynical political age: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
Until spring 2005, though, fans will have to make do with the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (www.hti.umich.edu/l/lincoln), published by the Abraham Lincoln Association. They can look forward to May, though, as the much-anticipated opening date of the Abraham Lincoln Public Library & Museum in Springfield (www.alplm.org), featuring 12 million documents including the Lincoln collection, and papers pertaining to the Civil War and Illinois history.
Ninety miles north of New York City, lies the Home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Historic Site, in Hyde Park (4097 Albany Post Rd., Hyde Park, NY 12538; www.nps.gov/hofr/hofrhome.html). The complex includes Springwood, the home where FDR was born and raised, and where he spent most of his adult life outside the White House. It's where America's only four-term president went to decompress as he led the nation through the Depression and World War II, and he is now buried on the premises. Roosevelt's home, rose garden and gravesite, icehouse, and stables are maintained by the National Park Service. The National Archives runs the FDR Presidential Museum and Library, also on the grounds, which includes the books and papers of Eleanor Roosevelt as well as those of the 31st president, from his terms as state senator, secretary of the Navy, New York governor, and his years in the White House, from 1933 to 1945. The Hyde Park complex also includes Val-Kill, Eleanor's stone cottage, and the Vanderbilt Mansion. Admission is free; guided tours are $14.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's (NARA) network of Presidential Libraries (tel. 301/837-3250; www.archives.gov/presidential_libraries/addresses/addresses.html) is scattered throughout the country, in the home states of every U.S. commander in chief since Herbert Hoover. Each library contains the president's records and papers, as well as a museum with public education programs. See NARA website for a complete list of facilities and their addresses.
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