In 1933 the leading museum expert Laurence Coleman acknowledged the shrine origins of the HHM movement. The homes “chosen to survive” were those “where celebrity is born, where fame makes its home, where art or science labors in erstwhile obscurity, where important incidents occur, where death visits the great.”⁹ In the twenty-first century, HHM staffs struggle to break the hold that fame and a whitewashed national unity have over their sites as well as to address modern institutional challenges. First, HHMs are too numerous. As birthplaces and properties of elites shrouded in outdated interpretations of the past, HHMs often lack diversity and relevancy.¹⁰ The MoRE broke new ground by deconstructing the Wilson shrine and reinventing the ideal American image typically found there. Instead Wilson’s home illuminates the patriotism of Black Americans working toward political, economic, and social equality when he was a teenager living in Reconstruction-era Columbia. This continues a process underway at the nation’s most prestigious presidential homes and reputable southern institutions, such as Mount Vernon and Monticello. By adopting the interpretive style of social historians, these HHMs now present more inclusive narratives that also incorporate nonwhite and working-class people in an attempt to provide a more holistic encounter with the past and its people and expand the museum-going audience. New interpretations of slavery at Monticello’s Mulberry Row and Whitney Plantation as well as a variety of tours available on the immigrant experience in New York’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum reflect some of these more successful attempts.¹¹

The MoRE could never entirely shed its presidential shrine origins. Historic Columbia chose instead to combine institutional history and neighborhood architecture at the beginning of the tour to tell this origin story. Docents and visitors depart the gift shop to start the tour and pass Township Auditorium, the structure that sparked the movement to save Wilson’s home. The tour lacks enough time to tell the full account of how white women’s organizations, namely the local unit of the ALA, saved the home despite fierce competition from Wilson’s birthplace in Staunton for resources, funding, and status. The Woodrow Wilson Family Home first opened in 1933 to the public, and for the next eighty years it functioned as a presidential shrine. Although the 2014 reinterpretation at MoRE would shed this foundation, Historic Columbia believed it important to include the museum’s origins and combine them with the Wilsons’ local movements and the evolution of the neighborhood as a “teaching tool.”¹²

The American Legion Richland Post No. 6 and its women’s auxiliary led the campaign to stop the destruction of Wilson’s home and replace it with Township Auditorium on the property. The state’s ALA first celebrated Page 32 →Wilson’s teenage years by placing a memorial tablet outside the home in 1925.¹³ However, women’s organizations and club leaders turned out in droves to support the ALA in preserving the home three years later. The president of the auxiliary in Columbia, Ruth Cappelmann, along with clubwomen such as Ann Cathcart, led the effort to save the home by first stopping its demolition and then campaigning for legislation and fundraising to transform it into a memorial. Cappelmann circumvented competition from a Wilson film documentary fundraiser and then lobbied the American Legion to place the home under the direct care of the state ALA and open it as a museum. Several of the foremost women from the auxiliary administered care for the Wilson home for the next thirty-five years, while Cappelmann served as caretaker for three decades.

Ruth Cappelmann established an early role in saving Wilson’s childhood home on its original property. As president of the local ALA, she signed the agreement in August 1928 that negotiated a deal to purchase the dwelling for a one-dollar down payment, halting its immediate demolition. The agreement required paying in cash the remaining balance of one thousand dollars to the Auditorium Committee, owners of the home and lot, within thirty days and moving the house off the property.¹⁴ In September 1928 Columbia’s American Legion and Legion Auxiliary appointed Cappelmann, Cathcart, Francis Lumpkin, and Agnes McMaster, four future chairwomen of the Wilson home, as auxiliary representatives to discuss the best way to remove the house.¹⁵ But less than a week later, the women changed the legion’s position, resolving to preserve the home where it stood on Hampton Avenue in a way favorable to the auditorium trustees.¹⁶

The campaign to save Wilson’s home immediately generated statewide interest and demonstrated how critical women’s organizations were.¹⁷ At the time, there were only four HHMs in the state of South Carolina. Three of them were administered or owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), the DAR, and the Colonial Dames. Two owned by the Charleston Museum opened not long after the Wilson home in the 1930s.¹⁸ Approximately 115 organizations across the state emerged by late 1928 as enthusiastic champions of enshrining the Wilson home. Ninety-five organizations passed formal resolutions in support of the preservation effort by the end of October. South Carolina’s American Legion, including its state president, seven posts, and seven sister auxiliaries, joined Columbia’s unit in solidarity.¹⁹ Columbia-based organizations sent about 20 percent of the total resolutions. One of these, the Richland County Federation of Women’s Clubs, was led by Marie Jones, a future chairwoman of the Wilson home and wife of one of the auditorium trustees. An impressive six resolutions came from local teacher improvement and parent-teacher organizations, signaling Page 33 →a small but well-connected network of white women actively involved and influential in public education. At least ten counties with women’s club wrote resolutions, including four book clubs, two Jewish organizations, music clubs, and study clubs. Rural women, too, came out in support, in the form of the Council of Farm Women in two counties. The community of Rock Hill forwarded an astounding seven resolutions supporting the project. White women’s organizations led the charge there too, drafting over 60 percent of the resolutions. War-inspired women’s organizations in the memorialization business also joined the ranks of the legionnaires. Thirteen chapters of the DAR and eight from the UDC, including Columbia’s Wade Hampton unit, submitted resolutions. One DAR chapter confidently claimed that women’s organizations in the state would financially support the restoration and upkeep of the home. Other noteworthy women’s groups enlisted in the campaign: the Daughters of 1812, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and Columbia’s Junior League, League of Women Voters, and a Colonial Dames branch.²⁰

Resolutions varied in focus but addressed six themes. The most popular, and especially important to women’s clubs, was preserving the home as a shrine. Eleven clubs, including the state American Legion, three chapters of the UDC, and two Federation of Women’s Clubs representing nine counties, referred to the home as such. Also prevalent among eleven organizations, mostly the war-related ones, was honoring Wilson as a war president. The other themes, in order of popularity, were the necessity of moving the auditorium to save the home, the historical value of the home, Wilson’s significance as a southerner and Democrat, and the importance of supporting Americanism.²¹

The ALA campaign forged ahead in January 1929 in its effort to get a bill passed through the state legislature to preserve the Wilson home on its original site. The bill appropriated $35,000, with $6,000 allotted for repairs and renovations and the remainder for purchase of the house and land. The bill empowered the Historical Commission of South Carolina to make the purchase and create a “Woodrow Wilson Memorial Museum.” Assuming a curatorial role, the commission developed the rules and regulations to procure or accept any historic relic, memento, or article related to the wars in which South Carolina and the nation engaged. The bill also proposed a close relationship with the Confederate Relic Room, operated by the local Wade Hampton chapter of the UDC in the State House. The third oldest museum in South Carolina, the relic room began collecting and preserving Confederate artifacts in 1896.²² The plan called for the relic room to move to the Wilson house and become custodian of the site. The Columbia legion and auxiliary posts hoped for but failed to secure permission to build additions Page 34 →onto the Wilson property and to move the artifacts from the relic room to the Wilson home to the satisfaction of the Wade Hampton chapter. The auxiliary’s legislative committee asked each unit to contact its legislator, even if at home for the weekend adjournment, and urged them to remain in contact with senators until the bill’s passage. Units could also collaborate with other community groups.²³

The bill passed March 7, 1929, but the reveling did not last long. After the legion and auxiliary celebrated with a tea at the Wilson house and the national commander of the American Legion lavished praise on Cappelmann for her “splendid work” in saving the home, the auxiliary immediately shifted into fundraising mode.²⁴ The unit donated the first $500 of $17,500 required in the bill and launched a campaign to raise half of appropriated funds, which benefited from the network of clubs that wrote resolutions and propelled several women into leadership. For three months, the executive committee of the Woodrow Wilson Purchase Fund (WWPF) met at the Chamber of Commerce in Columbia.²⁵ Cappelmann held the only position of power as a woman, rising from temporary secretary to elected secretary.²⁶ The committee authorized a weeklong publicity campaign ahead of a statewide campaign. Cappelmann invited the presidents of various clubs such as the DAR to meet with the group. The heads of pro–Wilson Home organizations across the state, often powerful clubwomen, served on the state executive committee along with the local officers of the WWPF committee. The state presidents of the Colonial Dames, League of Women Voters, American Legion, and ALA, as well as representatives from the SC Federation of Women’s Clubs, Sons of Confederate Veterans, and nearly a dozen others, made up the committee.²⁷

Two other auxiliary women active in the initial movement, Ann Cathcart and Francis Lumpkin, emerged as leaders. Lumpkin eventually became chairwoman of the Wilson home in 1938–39, followed by Cathcart the next year. Lumpkin and her sister-in-law Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin exemplify how women worked to support and occasionally reject the Lost Cause and white supremacist memory of Reconstruction. Katharine Lumpkin and the women in her family maintained close ties with Confederate women’s organizations at various points of their lives, and her sister was the maid of honor in an annual reunion parade of the Red Shirts. Yet she began to reject her father’s Lost Cause indoctrination after reading Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905) and attending a screening of The Birth of a Nation, as she recounts in her 1946 book, The Making of a Southerner. Francis married Bryan Lumpkin, Katharine’s youngest brother, a white conservative who opposed her liberal political views and resisted integration. In the same decade that Katharine worked for the YWCA and built an interracial coalition Page 35 →with Black student secretaries in her role as the organization’s national student secretary for the southern region, Francis began her work to save and manage the Wilson home.²⁸ Prior to her tenure as chair, Cathcart, next to Cappelmann, became the most vocal and active woman in the WWPF.²⁹ Cappelmann mostly took notes and observed during WWPF meetings. Cathcart presented new ideas and was a leader in fundraising. As counties began requesting quotas, she successfully pushed the local committee to hire a professional organizer for the state campaign.³⁰ The committee selected Cathcart as captain of the women’s team for the house-to-house canvas to raise funds.³¹ She organized the 180 chaperones accompanying 150 college students for Wilson Tag Day on May 8. She and Cappelmann along with two other WWPF members met with the governor to seek state funds. Cathcart was also part of a small group that met with the auditorium committee and unofficially secured the purchase of the lot for its original $28,000 price tag.³²

House canvasing and Tag Day proved most lucrative, bringing the campaign within $600 of its goal. The WWPF raised $14,000 in a month, often playing to people’s patriotism and Wilson’s historic relationship with the community. Fundraising letters requested that recipients solicit ten other citizens to “rescue” the home as their patriotic duty.³³ A joint DAR and ALA benefit near the end of the campaign had an extensive program, including Wilson’s childhood history, a poem dedication to his patriotism and good deeds, and “A History with Every Plant,” a plant sale “pregnant with associations of the immortal Wilson,” featuring items plucked from places where Wilson spent time.³⁴

On June 20, 1929, the state of South Carolina became owner of Wilson’s home, but the state ALA wanted administrative control. Initially the SC Historical Commission oversaw the house and procured the most prized Wilson artifact, the bed the president was born in.³⁵ With $1,000 remaining in appropriated funds, the bed arrived in time for the home’s dedication during the legion’s state convention in 1930. Alice Wilson McElroy, the president’s niece, included a bureau and table in the sale because she felt ashamed for taking the money. She needed tuition to educate her children after the family returned from a long missionary trip in Japan.³⁶ Despite this success, during preparation for the convention and dedication, the state auxiliary petitioned the American Legion to be named custodians, along with the local Richland County legion post. The ALA argued it had launched the movement to save the home and was a war-centered organization and thus a natural steward. Additionally World War I veterans and their widows, more so than other citizens, felt bound to Wilson.³⁷ The legion ignored the proposal for eight months, which prolonged passage at the state convention for two Page 36 →years. The 1932 act required public entry for no more than twenty-five cents. Funds for upkeep would come from a $500 general legion fund and ALA unit donations, ranging from $38 to $82 a year.³⁸

With the home under ALA control, Cappelmann continued to develop the Wilson site through her leadership in the ALA and other organizations. A founding member and vice president of the Crape Myrtle Garden Club, she secured two crape myrtle trees for landscaping.³⁹ She held the chair of the memorial for six consecutive terms and eight years overall (1956–62, 1964–66), by far the longest tenure, consecutive or otherwise. In her first year, she presided over a large reception held at the Wilson Home for the president’s one-hundredth birthday on December 28, 1956. She also served as chair the last two years the auxiliary ran the home. Claiming that it could no longer care for the memorial, the ALA relinquished control to the Richland County Historical Commission in 1966.⁴⁰

Ruth Cappelmann guided Woodrow Wilson’s childhood home into and out of the ALA’s charge, although other auxiliary women and women’s organizations helped her in the fight. At the end of her tenure, she reflected on the importance of Wilson and his childhood home. It was the only home his parents ever owned. His parents and sisters were buried at the local Presbyterian church. Cappelmann prized the family artifacts she had played a role in acquiring for the collection: Wilson’s bed, bureau, and table, his mother’s Bible and silk quilt, and the desk and chair that he used as New Jersey’s governor. In the end the work of Cappelmann and the ALA attracted the interest of National Geographic and Wilson’s most noted biographer Arthur S. Link, who began to ask new questions about Wilson’s childhood history.⁴¹

Despite the best efforts of Cappelmann and her successor Ann Cathcart, their passion to preserve Wilson’s childhood home in Columbia could not match the influence of Edith Galt Wilson and Emily Smith in saving the Wilson birthplace in Staunton, Virginia. It was not for a lack of trying. Cappelmann eagerly wanted the support of Wilson, who brushed off her several letters of inquiry during the ALA’s fundraising campaign. Cappelmann first reached out to learn more about President Wilson’s life in Columbia from those who knew him best. John Randolph Bolling, Edith Wilson’s brother and secretary, suggested Cappelmann contact Ray Stannard Baker, who was working on the authorized biography of the president.⁴² Baker made clear how much Columbia influenced Wilson, that the president’s years there were the “richest” and happiest of his childhood. He loved the home since it was planned by his mother and located a few blocks from the church where his father preached and his parents were buried. Baker opined that it would be Page 37 →a “great loss” if the “home so intimately associated” with Wilson’s childhood was razed.⁴³

Cappelmann did not realize when she first began to write to Wilson that Staunton was the real threat to ALA fundraising in the competition to be Woodrow Wilson’s premier southern childhood home. Cappelmann likely viewed the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Society as the fiscal menace. Four months following the president’s death in 1924, the Memorial Society released a ninety-minute compilation documentary, The Woodrow Wilson Film Memorial. It positively eulogized him and featured him delivering speeches, signing documents, and interacting with world leaders.⁴⁴ The film circulated the country as part of a fundraising campaign that benefited the Memorial Society, which also split the admission proceeds with local sponsors; however, the society was guaranteed at least fifty cents a head. In early 1929, society representative H.F. Drugan wrote to Cappelmann offering the ALA a chance to sponsor the film in advance of its tour in South Carolina. Cappelmann, perhaps believing the film would oversaturate the community with requests for Woodrow Wilson related donations, did not want the film to be associated with the ALA’s campaign or screened in the region. She wrote the First Lady twice more about the film. Wilson had not viewed it but was aware of it. In the end, by remaining friendly with Dugan and helping him network, Cappelmann masterfully dodged his efforts to meet, finally declining sponsorship during a phone conversation. She also convinced the Memorial Society to limit their viewings and fundraising to Charleston until the ALA’s campaign ended. Likely in exchange, Cappelmann arranged a meeting between Drugan and former Governor Richard Manning.⁴⁵

The last contact came from Governor John Richards and Cappelmann, who both invited Wilson to the house’s dedication in the summer of 1930. Wilson promised to “make every effort to attend” if not abroad, but she did not show.⁴⁶ Any interest she had in South Carolina seemed relegated to the Lowcountry. She visited Bernard Baruch’s plantation, Hobcaw Barony, in coastal Georgetown and attended a 1930 New York performance of the Society for the Preservation of Negro Spirituals, a group formed in 1922 by Charleston’s elite slave owner descendants to perform Gullah spirituals.⁴⁷ Even though Wilson lived in Staunton the shortest period during his infancy, the birthplace had the attention of his widow’s philanthropy and support.

The local community saved both the Columbia and Staunton, Virginia, homes at roughly the same time in the 1930s; yet the manse where Wilson was born and spent the least amount of time, now part of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum, possesses the strongest claim to him. Wilson and his second wife, Edith Galt, saw themselves as Virginians. Page 38 →As such Edith actively supported the preservation of the Staunton manse through large financial and artifact donations and fundraising. Wilson was one of eight US presidents from Virginia, placing him in the same lineage as founders George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. He cemented this status as one of Virginia’s sons by attending law school at the University of Virginia. Wilson returned to Staunton on numerous occasions to visit his sisters and cousins attending Augusta Female Seminary (Mary Baldwin College). He also called on his beloved Aunt Marion, who had lived in Augusta, Georgia, during the Civil War and Reconstruction as he did.⁴⁸ He felt confident he could discuss any issue with candor in Virginia with other men of his “own race and breeding.” Edith, native of Wytheville, Virginia, 150 miles southwest of Staunton, claimed Pocahontas and the state’s first families in her lineage. Her family were slaveholders on a plantation in the eastern part of the state, and her father was a circuit court judge. Early in their courtship, Wilson grew so comfortable with Edith during a fireside conversation following dinner that he told her about his childhood in the South and of his father. Edith, who was far too young to recall Reconstruction, nonetheless spoke of the “heartache” of the period.⁴⁹ The couple’s legacy as Virginians and southerners combined with the diligent work of Emily Smith, Staunton’s more successful equivalent of Ruth Cappelmann, and Edith Wilson ensured the home in which Wilson was born would be preserved as the premier shrine to the president, today comprising a one-block museum and research center.

Edith Wilson’s letters and donations demonstrate that she actively supported the preservation of the Staunton manse far more than the Wilson parents’ privately owned home in Columbia. The presidential library contains over one hundred letters written by Wilson regarding her husband’s birthplace. From its inception she was the honorary president of the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace Foundation (WWBF), but her presence was far more than honorary.⁵⁰ She displayed a silent leadership via advice and instructions to Smith. Wilson hid this private influence, exercised primarily in letters, behind the celebrity presence that she brought to public fundraising and events.

Smith’s leadership skills, honed in a variety of organizations, as well as her social standing with the community made her essential to the founding and success of the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace site.⁵¹ She felt a connection to Wilson because she belonged to the same church his father once pastored for, First Presbyterian. Smith’s command originated in her position as president of the Garden Club of Virginia in 1928. She persuaded the club to restore the gardens at the manse, purchased by Mary Baldwin College following Woodrow Wilson’s death in 1924. One of six women on the restoration committee as well as the local chair, Smith led locals in the three-year restoration project, completed in 1934. Her club’s Historic Garden Week, which she helped establish, raised more than $5,000.⁵²

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Page 40 →Preservation and commemoration moved slowly, despite the success of the gardens. However, Smith’s collaboration with Edith Wilson began to blossom. Smith and Wilson probably met for the first time in the early 1930s and certainly by 1932, when Wilson attended a “dignified and impressive little ceremony” designating the manse a permanent memorial open to the public.⁵³ She carefully navigated her role, often working behind the scenes when she deemed it more appropriate.⁵⁴ She refused to affiliate her name to an early plan to request funds from the federal government for fear of “great embarrassment” should the petition be denied. She compromised, arranging a lunch for Smith and two fellow committee members, Virginia senator Harry Byrd and Adm. Cary T. Grayson, Woodrow Wilson’s friend and doctor, to initiate discussion.⁵⁵ Always protective of the Wilson name, she avoided soliciting gifts in writing in case the WWBF board rejected the gift. As important as the president’s widow was “to the success of the movement,” Smith opined that she did not possess “the authority to form plans and appoint committees” on her own.⁵⁶ Not that it mattered much. Wilson continued to attend a variety of events to support the birthplace, but the Great Depression stifled momentum.⁵⁷

A new energy surrounded the project after 1938 with the formation of the WWBF.⁵⁸ Nearly a decade after Columbia’s campaign, a group of Stauntonians organized the foundation to purchase the property for conversion to a “national shrine.” Mary Baldwin College could not afford the halfmillion-dollar memorial it envisioned.⁵⁹ The WWBF exploited its proximity to the nation’s capital, meeting with and soliciting help from political elites. Staunton native Rose Hull, wife of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, became the foundation’s president, while Judge Lawrence Groner, chief justice of Washington DC’s Court of Appeals, served as chairman.⁶⁰ Smith simultaneously filled the assistant treasurer and secretary positions, and she continued to serve as the latter for sixteen years.⁶¹ By July 1939 the WWBF owned the manse, secured through a $10,000 appropriation by the Virginia General Assembly and a $15,000 donation from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation of New York.⁶² Wilson rejoiced, “It is good to know that at last the house is ours!! But that is only the first step. What we must now do is to gird our loins for the final one.”⁶³

By the busy tourist season of April 1939, the WWBF determined that it needed an endowment to maintain the home. Its dilapidated state meant cosmetic changes were no longer enough.⁶⁴ Despite abysmal funding, Smith, Wilson, and the local committee rejected the proposal to hire a campaign Page 41 →manager under the supervision of the ALA. Like in Columbia, the ALA could contact other state organizations and patriotic groups for support. Smith envisioned the WWBF committee controlling the endowment campaign as the UDC had done with Robert E. Lee’s birthplace at Stratford Hall. With Chairman Groner’s approval, Wilson offered Smith the chairmanship of Virginia’s state endowment campaign and promised that the honorary power structure of officer positions would not interfere with Smith’s work at the manse or ability to run the campaign. Smith reluctantly agreed.⁶⁵

Wilson gave decorating, preservation, and administrative advice from the beginning and was actively involved in getting the home ready for a formal opening and dedication. She, Smith, and President Rose Hull all agreed to restore the house to its original condition before pursuing cosmetic updates like painting. With a low budget of $3,000 for furnishings, Wilson’s focus turned to acquisitions.⁶⁶ Having made most of the monetary donations over the last decade, she halted all purchases to seek donations. To get the acquisitions rolling, she donated a bed, the lamp used by Wilson at the University of Virginia and in the White House, and twenty-seven pictures of his family and revered Virginians, including other presidents and Robert E. Lee. She also negotiated donations from her peers and family members, thus supplying the majority of the furniture and artifacts.⁶⁷ As the formal dedication, scheduled for May 4, 1941, approached, Wilson approved sinks and paint. She advised how to hang chandeliers, hide electrical connections on top of the mantels, and match materials effectively. She helped draft the invitation list, filled with Washington elites.⁶⁸ President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated the “shrine to freedom” and brought national prestige to the day. Edith described as perfect the opening and the “lovely” furnishings she secured. The day’s only flaw was the fringe on the big bed, which Wilson deemed too short.⁶⁹

As Wilson feared would happen, World War II brought financial difficulties to the newly opened birthplace. This site held a large place in her “own small world” amid the uncertainty of war. Frugal spending and a new army hospital kept her and Smith optimistic. Fundraising for the home rather than the war proved difficult during rationing and seemed improper. She and a few supporters managed to raise fifty dollars to add to the foundation’s measly thirty-three-dollar bank balance.⁷⁰ Wilson never promised specific donation amounts, but her financial contributions, along with Rose Hull securing a thousand-dollar donation from Nelson Rockefeller, kept the institution afloat.⁷¹

A generous gift of $25,000 from 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation in 1944 changed the WWBF’s financial status by finally making a $100,000 endowment possible. Wilson’s behind-the-scenes negotiations proved critical. Page 42 →She likely offered extensive help with Fox’s production of a Woodrow Wilson film, because the company wanted to give her $50,000 personally. She directed the money be given to the birthplace. Lest she give the appearance of commercializing her husband’s memory, Wilson asked that press language originally referencing her donation as a gift be changed to place emphasis on Fox, Rose Hull, and building an endowment. Nonetheless, Wilson expected to attend any affiliated event. To her chagrin, she missed Fox’s Woodrow Wilson film premiere on September 18, 1944, because she received only a few days’ notice and had another engagement in South Carolina. She placed blame on the invitation committee, not Smith, but her irritation showed. She thanked Smith for sending the train schedule that “now I do not need.”⁷²

Despite Wilson’s embarrassment at missing the Fox premiere, she remained heavily involved with the birthplace over the next decade. She influenced leadership and administration. She wrote Smith with advice, met with her and the board when possible, and aided in board member and officer selection. She facilitated the transition to a new cadre of leadership in 1949, including a new woman vice president of the WWBF, and proposed a change to the by-laws regarding trustees to make the organization run more smoothly. Wilson also raised funds and gave from her own pocketbook, wishing all the while she and Smith “had some of the Rockefeller millions.”⁷³

Edith’s support waned, however, as the nation neared the centennial celebration of Woodrow Wilson’s birth in 1856. She was overwhelmed with the number of centennial invitations flooding her mailbox. She missed more meetings but attended Staunton’s major centennial celebrations.⁷⁴ On January 10, 1956, the birthplace converted the room that Wilson was born in (Columbia possessed the bed) into a temporary post office. It sold twenty-five thousand commemorative stamps on the first day. The day of the centennial, Wilson rode in the birthplace’s most prized possession, the 1919 Pierce-Arrow limousine, her first artifact gift to the site in 1925. The president’s “favorite car” broke down during the parade, forcing Wilson to transfer to another car.⁷⁵

At the same time as Wilson’s presence diminished, Smith grew even more prominent in the hierarchy of power. She became second vice president of the WWBF in 1954. Finally, in 1957, Smith accepted the presidency. She declined this position for two decades because she believed it was better for the site if nationally prominent figures held the top positions. Under Smith’s tenure, President Dwight Eisenhower visited the home in 1960, prompting Wilson’s most political and critical letter to Smith.⁷⁶ Edith was both “surprised” and “distressed” by Eisenhower’s visit ten days before the presidential election, which she called “a political trick.”⁷⁷ As a John F. Page 43 →Kennedy supporter, she refused to be present on the grounds or be photographed with Eisenhower. She viewed it as disloyal to her husband. After the 1960 election, Wilson began plans to lure Kennedy to the site. She wrote to Jacqueline Kennedy, First Lady to First Lady. By late 1961 Kennedy verbally accepted Wilson’s personal invitation to visit.⁷⁸ Both Wilson and Kennedy died before the visit could occur. Staunton held a memorial service for Edith Wilson on January 28, 1962. Wilson biographer Arthur S. Link spoke. Wilson, not surprisingly, gave $25,000 from her estate to the birthplace’s endowment fund. Her enduring goal was to see the endowment reach $100,000. Before her death, Wilson secured a final critical donation of $17,000 from an unknown acquaintance, which pushed the fund over $100,000.⁷⁹

Smith proved an excellent steward of Wilson’s birthplace and legacy. She expanded the network of women’s groups critical to Staunton’s early success to keep the birthplace relevant after the old guard retired or passed away, and she secured a garage for the restored Pierce-Arrow.⁸⁰ She also drew Arthur Link further into the organization. Link served on the memorial commission and later the board of trustees.⁸¹ He supported Smith’s proposed education center, pushing for a corresponding exhibit with a room devoted to “photographic reproductions” of important Wilson letters and state papers and offered to select documents. Wilson artifacts were difficult to obtain, and Edith willed most of her items to S Street and the National Trust. Link donated a set of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson and recommended Wilson books, usually ones he authored, for sale at the birthplace. Link’s son and namesake acted as chairman of the library’s board of directors after the WWBF transitioned to a presidential library.⁸²

Smith transformed Wilson’s birthplace into a respected institution, although her vision surpassed her tenure. After thirty-five years of Wilson shrine-making, she was celebrated by the city of Staunton and the state of Virginia with a 1968 testimonial dinner.⁸³ The director of the American Association for State and Local History congratulated her for being that “one single individual” on a preservation and commemoration project who brought in and nurtured its many supporters. Even President Richard Nixon thanked her for her service to one of his favorite presidents.⁸⁴ However, Smith’s dream of a Wilson education center, auditorium, museum, and library remained unrealized when she retired in 1973 as president emeritus. She died two years later.⁸⁵ In 2002 the WWBF changed its name to the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, an autonomous, independent presidential library free of the national library system’s oversight. In the early aughts, the site began working on a new interpretation that incorporated Wilson’s legacy and flaws, hoping to shed some of the birthplace’s shrine orientation.⁸⁶

Edith Wilson bequeathed her Washington, DC, home to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, but not until her death in 1961, giving her plenty of time to devote to Staunton. While bolstering Staunton, Wilson prepared the legacy for S Street, an extension of her presidential memory making begun with Staunton.⁸⁷ While Staunton celebrated her husband’s birth and roots, S Street commemorated Wilson’s presidency and the couple’s final years in DC. The Wilson homes in Staunton, Augusta, and Columbia address Wilson’s youth, but the President Woodrow Wilson House (PWWH) was Edith’s vision of Woodrow’s swan song. The home, purchased with Wilson’s Nobel Peace Prize money, was six years old when the couple arrived in 1921. It supposedly changed little after 1924, when Wilson died, and included artifacts from his time as president. What Edith Wilson did not donate to Staunton fills this final home. The museum opened in 1963 and focuses on Wilson’s Washington years and foreign policy from 1912 until 1924, a fitting choice since he was the only president to live exclusively in the nation’s capital after departing the White House until Barack Obama. Recently the PWWH expanded its mission to include “regressive policies that institutionalized racism, segregation and the loss and obstruction of civil liberties.”⁸⁸

Edith Wilson’s memory looms large in the home she occupied for forty years, though only thirty-five months were with Woodrow. She envisioned the home as a memorial to her late husband.⁸⁹ The sheer number of artifacts, many gifts and mementos from the White House, and Wilson’s interment at the National Cathedral two miles away gives PWWH the interpretive feel of a mausoleum. Edith wanted a burial location befitting a global dignitary but ruled out Arlington at Wilson’s request and Princeton since he left amid controversy. She dismissed the southern cities of his past, reasoning that he had rarely visited his former homes. In addition only Columbia’s First Presbyterian Church held a Wilson family plot, which was full. Edith never considered burial alongside Wilson’s first wife, Ellen.⁹⁰

The mausoleum effect reflects Edith Wilson’s narrative of memorialization, both celebratory and full of struggle. Lisa Lopez argues that “domestic spaces tend to become mausoleums—meaningful in their permanence, but petrified and lifeless in their presentations.”⁹¹ In the case of the PWWH, this petrified interpretation is intentional and authentic to Wilson’s experience. PWWH docent Betty van Iersel noted that Wilson only had three good years with her husband before she became a caregiver. She felt compelled to fulfill this role out of a sense of duty not unlike her unique commitment to preserving her husband’s memory in the HHM movement.⁹² Though disability history is not a focus of the tour, the mausoleum effect is Page 45 →most prominent in the nurse’s room, which separated Wilson’s and Edith’s bedrooms. One of the most peculiar items in the PWWH collection, an electroshock therapy machine used on Wilson, shocks visitors into imagining a time this was an accepted medical treatment for stroke-related ailments.⁹³

By the 1960s those closest to Woodrow Wilson, volunteers, organizations, and museum professionals had enshrined him in three historic house museums across the South. Edith Wilson proved vital in ensuring that his birthplace in Staunton possessed the strongest claim to his legacy and his Virginian roots. She curated his presidency and death by donating her Washington, DC, home to the National Trust, which gave the site instant legitimacy. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the least funded and celebrated of the HHMs, the Woodrow Wilson Family Home in Columbia, shuttered its doors for nearly a decade, renovating the home and preparing a radical new interpretation. In that vacuum a new HHM emerged in Augusta, Georgia, staking claim to Woodrow Wilson’s southern upbringing during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Southerners displayed an eagerness to save Wilson’s homes, even if his northern residences, such as Prospect House at Princeton, failed to generate interest among preservationists. Presidential narrative drove the Wilson HHMs that originally opened as shrines. Today the sites in Staunton, Augusta, and Columbia not only anchor his identity in the South but also serve as a map tracing Joseph Wilson’s career in the Presbyterian Church after he left Ohio for Virginia.⁹⁴ That career traversed the South. Thinking deeply about the elder Wilson’s career, the impact of the Woodrow family, and Tommy Wilson’s childhood in these communities illuminates a much clearer image of what it means to define President Wilson as a southerner. These homes as artifacts, and the rich material culture, exhibits, and interpretation within them, provide windows into Wilson’s youth as well as how public historians have interpreted his southernness and the region’s effect on his policies and racial views.

Wilson biographer Arthur Link and Ray Stannard Baker, who corresponded with Cappelmann and is frequently cited by Link, both identified the twenty-eighth president as a southerner.⁹⁵ His family and the first decades of his life in the South contributed to his distinctly southern characteristics. Writing Wilson’s biography in the post–World War II Jim Crow era, Link labeled Wilson, like his fellow upper-class white southerners, as paternalistic in his attitude toward Black Americans. The only ideology that defined him more than his southernness was his Presbyterianism.⁹⁶ In 1909, Page 46 →before offering remarks on his interpretation of Gen. Robert E. Lee, Wilson wrote about his own regional identity:

It is all very well to talk of detachment of view, and of the effort to be national in spirit and in purpose, but a boy never gets over his boyhood, and never can change those subtle influences which have become part of him, that were bred in him when he was a child. So I am obliged to say again and again that the only place in the country, the only place in the world, where nothing has to be explained to me, is the South. Sometimes, after long periods of absence, I forget how natural it is to be in the South, and then the moment I come, and see old friends again, and discover a country full of reminiscences which connect me with my parents, and with all the old memories, I know again the region to which I naturally belong.⁹⁷

Wilson’s election elated white southerners and represented national reunification among white people a half century after the Civil War. Wilson was the first southerner elected to the presidency since Zachary Taylor in 1848 and, other than Grover Cleveland’s two nonconsecutive terms, the first from the Democratic Party since James Buchanan’s disastrous tenure on the eve of the Civil War. Wilson’s election signaled the resurgence of the South and the Democratic Party to national leadership and national reunion. A Presidential Library museum exhibit in 2015 reinforced the reunification narrative, though the panel “Washington Welcomes a Democrat to the White House” did not invite readers to consider how white Democrats resumed their powerful position in national politics by overturning Reconstruction and implementing Jim Crow terror and disenfranchisement.⁹⁸ President Wilson’s South was constructed and controlled by white people, and thus white southerners loved him. The imagined community of white southerners, despite their support for slavery and racial apartheid, believed they were exceptional but also descended from enlightened Europeans, particularly the English. Their loyalty lay with two nations, for they were fiercely nationalistic but also proud of the Confederacy. Wilson represented this ideal well. His mother was born in Carlisle, England, and his father supported the Confederacy.⁹⁹

The tension of reunion manifested itself when Wilson almost declined to speak at the fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg on July 4, 1913. The absence of Black veterans or press affiliated with an event reuniting more than fifty-three thousand US and Confederate troops visually marked the end of the sectional conflict for white Americans. Wilson mentioned race only once in his speech and alluded to slavery only obliquely.¹⁰⁰ He made no mention of Page 47 →the four million Americans freed by the Thirteenth Amendment at the end of the war, which he likely remembered as an eight-year-old child living in Augusta, Georgia. Nor did he note the Jim Crow disfranchisement of Black southerners and a dormant Fifteenth Amendment that promised universal male suffrage back when he was just a teenager living in Columbia during Reconstruction.

The executive branch of the federal government forged a relationship with the UDC to facilitate national reunification via memorialization at Arlington National Cemetery. Both presidents William Taft and Theodore Roosevelt opened the White House to UDC presidents to discuss federal assistance in burying Confederate soldiers at Arlington and constructing a Confederate monument. Wilson completed the reconciliation process by attending the Arlington monument unveiling and accepting it as a gift from the UDC as a celebration of national unity. However, reunification between Wilson and the UDC predated his presidency. While Princeton’s president, he judged the inaugural UDC essay contest on southern history, with a prosouthern slant, hosted by Columbia University in 1906.¹⁰¹ Given Wilson’s relationship with the organization, it is little wonder that South Carolina branches of the UDC worked to save the Columbia home.

The Woodrow Wilson Boyhood Home in Augusta was the last Wilson HHM created, opening on September 29, 2001. A Creel Foundation study focusing on the site’s architecture, archeology, history, and landscape determined that interpreting Wilson’s life as a southerner during the Civil War and Reconstruction would fill a noticeable gap in the Wilson historiography. Executive director Erick Montgomery’s well-researched book illuminating Wilson’s time in Augusta and the South, published by Historic Augusta, provided a source and opportunity to fill this gap as well as rich context for Wilson’s southern ideology.¹⁰² Montgomery relied heavily on a 1994 report by Historic Augusta and research focused on Wilson’s parents and childhood communities. He retraced Wilson’s time in Atlanta with a failed law firm, his relationship with future wife Ellen in Georgia, and Wilson’s return to Augusta in 1911. Despite this invaluable resource, Augusta’s tour and interpretation, developed by Montgomery, Dr. Lee Ann Caldwell of Augusta State University, and historic preservation planner Anne S. Floyd, falls short. Its interpretation of Wilson’s southern influences omits several insightful observations made by Montgomery himself.¹⁰³

The Augusta manse in which Wilson grew up transferred hands and changed functions for over a century. No longer able to afford the maintenance, Augusta’s First Presbyterian Church sold the home in 1930.¹⁰⁴ Suggesting that the Wilson family liked the design of the manse, the Columbia home replicates several of its features: the gasolier, original slate mantels Page 48 →with faux marble, two closets, a storage space beneath the stairs, a back porch bathroom on each floor, and a two-story kitchen.¹⁰⁵ Subsequent owners modified the former manse into rental spaces, a florist shop, and the aptly named Woodrow Wilson Beauty Salon. In 1980, a year after being placed on the National Register, the site briefly opened as a private house museum displaying Victorian antiques. The city purchased Georgia’s oldest presidential home on May 25, 1991, for $200,000 at auction at the request of the executive committee of Historic Augusta, Inc., which counted Mayor Charles A. DeVaney among its membership. Historic Augusta took ownership and responsibility for restoring and managing the public site.¹⁰⁶

It took less than a decade to restore and interpret the last Wilson HHM. Arthur Link, a long supporter of the Staunton home, visited Augusta in May 1992 as the keynote speaker for the first Woodrow Wilson Symposium, held at the manse, the First Presbyterian Church, and Augusta State University. Historic Augusta hired professionals and formed committees to undertake the extensive and varied research and work required to restore the home to its beautiful 1860s form with remarkable attention to detail. This included analyzing paint, regraining, restoring faux marbling, hunting for appropriate period furnishings, and garden planning. The church loaned thirteen original pieces used by the Wilsons. Historic Augusta launched a three-million-dollar fundraising campaign for private and municipal funds. In 1995 the organization purchased the Supreme Court justice Joseph R. Lamar’s boyhood home next door as a space for visitors and staff for the future museum. On the eve of the public opening, September 28, 2001, Historic Augusta hosted an inaugural gala attended by hundreds of supporters and nineteen descendants of Wilson’s parents, Joseph and Janet.¹⁰⁷

The manse tour omits insights about Wilson’s Reconstruction experience in favor of immersing guests in Civil War–era Georgia.¹⁰⁸ The Civil War dominates the tour narrative more than any revision or addition to the historiographical gap of Wilson’s childhood. The war constantly looms over the lives of the family. Four-year-old Wilson’s first memory was of Abraham Lincoln’s election. The tour narrative describes the “conversational setting” of the parlor as a public space likely made the war a hot topic among the family and their guests. Although no battles were waged in Augusta, injured soldiers received treatment a block away from the home. First Presbyterian transformed into a hospital in 1863, perhaps providing Wilson’s two sisters with volunteer opportunities to nurse Union soldiers on the lawn or Confederate soldiers inside. Joseph even traveled with the Confederacy as a missionary for a summer. Tommy Wilson did not suffer much personally during the war. Montgomery believes that Joseph and Jessie sheltered Page 49 →him due to his age, and he came to see the daily life of the home front as normative.¹⁰⁹

If Wilson’s formative years took place in Augusta and his exposure to the Civil War was limited, then Reconstruction was the most influential period of his young life. Yet Reconstruction was not named nor connected to Wilson’s childhood on the WWBH tour. In fact, the end of the war brought excitement to his routine. Wilson remembered the anxiety generated by rumors circulating that Gen. William T. Sherman would possibly target Augusta. Sherman never came. In the summer of 1865, Wilson rushed to see the defeated Confederate president Jefferson Davis, under arrest, when he rode by with his guards en route to Fortress Monroe. An unusually large crowd of Black residents also followed Davis’s procession, perhaps to see with their own eyes the downfall of the Confederacy and the end of slavery in the South.¹¹⁰ Incorporating how the Black community and Wilson’s family viewed Davis’s arrival, as both a sign of defeat and celebrity, would diversify the tour narrative with multiple perspectives of freedom and loss.

Montgomery’s book and the tour say little about Reconstruction as a force shaping Wilson’s youth even though his daily life as a child is illuminated. Wilson experienced a charmed postwar childhood. A series of four laminated pictures he drew, several of which are replicated in Columbia’s exhibit, depict a happy kid. Wilson sketched wartime and postwar Augusta and its trains as they brought Federal troops and moved goods. He took field trips to manufacturing plants with his father just as they had done during the war and played on the tracks built for the first horse-drawn streetcars. His drawing of the Light Foot Base Ball Club lineup included two hot air balloons, his way of remembering a traveling balloon that came to town offering rides for twenty-two cents. He got his first taste of baseball and leadership with the Light Foot Club.¹¹¹ As president he convened meetings using parliamentary procedure in his stable’s hayloft and created a constitution and bylaws for the team. He played with his next-door neighbors Joseph and Phillip Lamar, whose father was also a minister. In 1910 President Taft named Joseph Lamar to the Supreme Court. Before his inauguration Wilson wrote Lamar with fond, vivid recollections of playing with the brothers. When Wilson arrived in Washington, he visited with “Joe” for the first time since moving from Augusta.¹¹² Sharing the rich Reconstruction-era experiences of Tommy Wilson’s life in the WWBH tour would refute the argument that Reconstruction was a disaster for white southerners. Furthermore, revising the tour’s Civil War narrative into a discussion of how the Confederacy influenced Wilson’s father and his career would illuminate what southernness meant to the Wilson family and how it was crafted by them.

The most influential force in Wilson’s young life was his family; however, the extent to which his mother’s side of the family, the Woodrows, developed Wilson’s southernness and bolstered his parents’ prestige is more profound than the WWBH tour acknowledges. The tour introduces two Woodrow family members who helped the Wilsons plant deeper southern roots. Joseph presided over Dr. James Woodrow’s wedding to Felixina Shepherd Baker in Georgia. Afterward First Presbyterian, which had been without a pastor for half a decade, offered to triple Wilson’s salary in Staunton. James, the first Woodrow to head south, possessed the greatest intellectual prowess in the family. His work with the Confederacy and move to Columbia placed him and Joseph in similar ideological, intellectual, and social circles. After the Wilsons moved to Augusta, James’s sister Marion Woodrow came for an extended stay, married James Bones in the manse, and moved to a home near the Augusta arsenal. The Boneses expanded and reinforced the Wilsons social connections and “position among the Southern aristocracy.”¹¹³ Their “tomboy” daughter, Jessie, played with Wilson and later introduced him to Ellen. During Reconstruction the pair attempted to convert the “wicked” Yankees they encountered into good Presbyterian people. Aunt Marion devastated the children with news that the troops next door at the arsenal fought against the South.¹¹⁴ One early Wilson biographer claimed that the cousins also played “Cowboys and Indians” and “attacked” Black children. Painted up in pokeberry juice, wearing feathered headdresses, and armed with bows and arrows, the children waited near a Black settlement in the woods for “little darkies” headed to town packing wood on their heads. With cries of war, the pair launched their surprise attack, capturing no one and “consol[ing] themselves by remembering that kinky wool would not make attractive scalps to hang at their belts.”¹¹⁵ Whether true or not, that this anecdote appears in a biography published before Wilson’s presidency demonstrates how accepted white supremacy was among white Americans, especially those from the South.

Wilson created other fond memories during Reconstruction as well. In 1866 he attended a new school run by Joseph Tyrone Derry, who served four years in the Confederate army. Although Derry thought Wilson an apathetic, below-average student, Wilson admired Derry enough to host him at the White House. Wilson remembered warmly the economic rebuilding of Reconstruction and arrival of the first horse-drawn streetcars. He and his friends made scissors out of crossed pens on the track.¹¹⁶ In a 1909 speech celebrating Robert E. Lee’s hundredth birthday, Wilson recalled seeing the defeated general during his three-day visit to Augusta in spring of 1870. He Page 51 →recalled the “delightful memory of standing, when a lad, for a moment by General Lee’s side and looking up into his face.”¹¹⁷

Despite the lessons learned in Augusta during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Wilson himself understood that the foundation of one’s beliefs came from family and community. In a 1904 speech, he said home and family were “the first and most intimate and most important organization for the indoctrinating of the next generation.” His father cautioned him that the mind was “not a prolix gut to be stuffed” but rather a “vessel made to transmute something.”¹¹⁸ Thus two Confederates, a soldier turned teacher and the other a sympathetic supporter from the home front, laid the cornerstone of Wilson’s education and belief system. Joseph cultivated his son’s intellect in the offices and parlors of these HHMs, imprinting the pastor’s adopted southern, pro-Confederate ideology on young Tommy.

WWBH executive director Erick Montgomery declared that Augusta was where the “first Southern president following Reconstruction learned to be Southern” before “his destiny” took him north.¹¹⁹ Yet the tour shares only a sliver of the wealth of knowledge about Joseph Wilson’s transformation into southerner and Confederate sympathizer, which illuminates how deeply white supremacy penetrated Wilson’s domestic sphere. The interpretation of his study directly confronts Joseph’s Confederate and proslavery ideology. In an 1861 meeting, the Presbyterian Church split after the southern members of the church sided with the Confederacy. Joseph continued to work for the wealthy Augusta congregation within the newly formed southern branch. He left his fashionable neighborhood to travel with the Confederate army.¹²⁰

Wilson’s Confederate sympathies extended much further than the WWBH depicts. The war not only split the Presbyterian Church, but it also fueled Joseph’s burgeoning career. He began to excel professionally in Virginia despite his northern roots. He developed his administrative skills as principal of Augusta Female Seminary (Mary Baldwin College) in Staunton in 1855–56 and as elected moderator of the Presbytery of Lexington, Virginia. In addition he pastored Black congregants. Joseph drew scores of new members into his Augusta congregation, including at least thirteen Black members his first year. For a brief period, he conducted segregated Sunday schools for Black members from First Presbyterian Church before they were absorbed back into the main church.¹²¹ The Presbyterian Church’s schism provided Wilson an opportunity to climb quickly into leadership positions and new levels of professional prestige he had been missing. The southern church withdrew after the General Assembly forbade assistance to rebellious states, which would be interpreted as treason in the South. The southern churches already believed the war to be an unjust attack on the right Page 52 →to maintain slavery. Wilson was not upset at the division. He watched the thrilling spectacle of the Southern Presbyterian Church electing new General Assembly representatives, including his position of permanent clerk in December 1861. The assembly elected him stated clerk a few years later, a position he held until 1898. In 1863 the Bible Society of the Confederate States hosted its first annual meeting with Wilson, and the First Presbyterian Church named him head of the Committee of Publication. At the next annual meeting, the society elected him to the board of managers. The year continued to be busy for the pastor. At the request of Columbia’s Executive Committee of Domestic Mission of the Southern Presbyterian Church and with permission of his church, Wilson spent the summer as a missionary for the army. To support the war proved professionally lucrative, but as the WWBH tour noted, it put Joseph at odds with his northern family, especially his three brothers serving in military or government positions for the Union. However, his view aligned more with the Woodrow side of the family. James Woodrow, living in Columbia since 1861, was chief of the Confederate army’s medical laboratory from 1863 until 1865. James Bones, his brother-in-law, ranked as a second lieutenant in the 19th Battalion Georgia Infantry.¹²²

Joseph endorsed slavery and supported the Confederacy through all means available to him as a pastor except combat service. In a sermon in early January 1861 titled “Mutual Relation of Masters and Slaves as Taught in the Bible,” which was circulated in the press, he addressed his “slaveholding brethren” and the “institution we are resolved to cherish.” Wilson cut one sermon short, using his pulpit for a patriotic call to his congregation, specifically the women. He asked them to wrap paper cartridges in the munitions factory to meet an important deadline for an impending battle in Virginia under General Lee, whose troops did not have enough ammunition. Wilson’s fascination with homefront production led to field trips with his son to see operations, an informal education in total war. Wartime Augusta produced gunpowder, pistols, textiles, army boots, and shoes. The canal and railroads stretching to Savannah, Atlanta, Columbia, and Charleston transformed the city into one the Confederacy’s few manufacturing and distribution centers. Wilson was also a member of the Silver Greys, a group formed to defend and help the home front made up of approximately 117 men over the age of forty-five. He worked on behalf of soldiers, delivering letters to local infantrymen who were nearby on his trip to Staunton. He placed “tens of thousands” of copies of the New Testament and the Psalms in troops’ hands, a performance of Confederate religion that women carried out as well as southern ministers. According to historian W. Scott Poole delivering the Bibles was an aesthetic ritual but also part of larger “ritual of devotion to the Confederacy” Page 53 →that conferred chivalry upon the troops and deemed them protectors of all things feminine, including a version of the South constructed as such. In addition Wilson served as a “special agent” with the Georgia Relief and Hospital Association before joining the board of superintendents and eventually becoming its chair. The relief organization established hospitals to treat soldiers, raised funds, and sent packages from loved ones to soldiers.¹²³ Wilson actively supported the Confederate cause and traveled frequently for war-related issues, topics that would have dominated conversation and household activity in the manse. The Wilsons did not simply watch helplessly as the war unfolded. Joseph Wilson enthusiastically embraced the changes in the church that came with secession and worked diligently to improve his professional and social standing through his contributions to the South’s war effort and wartime opportunities that came his way.

When Reconstruction arrived, Wilson struggled to navigate its political waters. Other than serving on the education committee for the Augusta Orphan Asylum, his activism waned significantly following the war. When his father-in-law, Thomas Woodrow, planned a visit in late 1866, Wilson told him to be “prepared to preach a good deal.” He joked that “my people will be greatly pleased to have you occupy my pulpit, even if you have voted the radical ticket!” Wilson quickly grew weary of the politics of Reconstruction. He cared “but little about the politics of the country” and had “lost all confidence” in both parties, which were “contending for the mastery of the North” in the name of party “not country.” He turned his attentions instead to the “fate” of the church “amidst this strife of human passions.” Foreshadowing the political and racial violence that would accompany the election of 1876, Wilson said, “I fear that much evil, possibly much blood shed, will come from their angry contentions for power. Meanwhile, we are here left in a state of most painful uncertainty and alarm.” Even though they disagreed at times, Wilson looked forward to hearing his father-in-law’s “honest” and “candid” political opinions.¹²⁴

Wilson once more returned to his southern household when he moved the family from Augusta to Columbia, South Carolina, in 1870. After becoming a school board member for the Columbia Theological Seminary in February 1866 and its chairman in 1868, he attended the May 1870 meeting of the Southern Presbyterian General Assembly and learned the seminary, the primary institution of higher learning for the church, wanted him to fill a position as professor of pastoral and evangelistic theology and sacred rhetoric. He won the election, reaching the pinnacle of his career, during Reconstruction, no less. The prestigious position came with less income and no housing, but the church had spoken. The First Presbyterian Church released Joseph for the fall semester. In the move, his wife, Jessie, lost one sibling but gained Page 54 →another, trading Marion in Augusta for James, who also worked at the seminary and taught at South Carolina College in Columbia.¹²⁵

Locals in Staunton and Augusta welcomed their native son’s return near the time of his election and continue to commemorate Woodrow Wilson’s visits in their contemporary interpretation. Scouting his appeal as a presidential candidate, the New Jersey governor arrived in Augusta for a two-day trip on November 18, 1911. Wilson explored the city with excited locals and on his own by foot. He attended receptions and dinners. He sat once again in the congregation of First Presbyterian Church and met with his old Sunday school teacher. He took an afternoon drive to his Aunt Marion’s suburban neighborhood. He reminisced about the baseball team he helped found. The WWBH tour proudly recounts Wilson’s lunch visit to the manse to corroborate that the president scuffed up the dining room table, the most prized artifact. He supposedly crawled underneath the table to search for decades-old scuff marks he left as a boy. Wilson received a brief reprieve from glad-handing while watching baseball star Ty Cobb lead a production at Augusta’s Grand Theater. While talking with the local press afterward, Wilson, overwhelmed with childhood memories, said, “I am not thinking of myself as a man, but as a boy, I walked about this city this afternoon and visited many of the old familiar places, which brought back memories of the past. And, tonight, I don’t wish to be disturbed from my thoughts of my boyhood. I still want to think of myself as a boy and not a grown-up.” Wilson left on the night train to Savannah, thrust back into adulthood, a southerner posed to become the Democrat’s candidate for president in 1912.¹²⁶

One month after his election, Wilson celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday in his birthplace of Staunton. The interpretive materials at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum (WWPLM) boasts of the return of “the hometown boy who made good.” Images depict downtown Staunton decorated in red, white, and blue bunting and Wilson on the porch of the manse, waving his hat to admirers. One picture of the crowd gathered to hear Wilson speak on the steps of Mary Baldwin College shows no Black southerners supporting the president-elect. Like his Gettysburg speech in 1913, the celebration of Wilson’s election and the reintegration of the South did not include the Black community of Staunton. The WWPLM re-created the dinner for Wilson’s fifty-sixth birthday at a reception dinner celebrating his sesquicentennial.¹²⁷

Erick Montgomery called the relocation of the Wilsons to Georgia the “initial step in the making of the first Southern President following Reconstruction.” The Presidential Library concurs that Wilson was “above all a Page 55 →Southerner,” because, as he said, he was “born Virginian. A man’s lineage is more important than this linkage.”¹²⁸ The comprehensive nature of the WWPLM leaves little time to question how Wilson’s southern upbringing shaped him. Because Edith Wilson resided at the S Street home in DC for nearly four decades after her husband’s death, her life and the nine years she devoted to Wilson define the mood of the Woodrow Wilson Home. Little of the material culture or docent interpretation addresses Wilson’s life before becoming president much less his southern upbringing. The MoRE at the Woodrow Wilson Family Home in Columbia rectifies this omission in the first three Wilson shrines saved by Ruth Cappelmann, Emily Smith, and Edith Wilson. Although not saved by women or their organizations in the 1930s, the WWBH in Augusta, Georgia, and the research it yielded at the turn of the twenty-first century has provided much-needed insight into Wilson’s southern rearing. Montgomery’s scholarship presents a more complete picture of a southern boy named Tommy who became president. When properly applied, his evidence and research revises Wilson historiography, filling an important gap in questions of how race, the Confederacy, and Reconstruction shaped the president. Had Augusta employed this interpretation, its site, like the MoRE, would have made a radical transformation in an era of abundant HHMs. Page 56 →