by Don’t be jealous, but we managed to take a tour of the Boyhood Home of Woodrow Wilson in Augusta, Georgia. We are racking up those presidential sites for Doug!
We have previously visited his birthplace home in Staunton, Virginia; his last home and deathplace in Washington, D.C.; the birthplace of his second wife Edith Bolling Galt Wilson in Wytheville, Virginia; and peered through the gate at the President’s home in Princeton University where Wilson served from 1902 to 1910. Doug also stopped by his other boyhood home in Columbia, South Carolina, many years ago.
28th US President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) moved into this home with his family when he was just 3 (at which time he was called “Tommy” because his first name is Thomas, not Woodrow — you didn’t know that, did you!), and spent his formative years here, not leaving until he was 16.
The home was the manse of the First Presbyterian Church, of which Wilson’s father was the pastor. (Fun fact: the Lamar family lived in the house next door, and son Joe was Tommy Wilson’s closest friend during the family’s time in Augusta. Joseph Lamar would grow up to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Taft, two years before Wilson was elected President.)
The church is diagonally across the street, and during the Civil War its outdoor areas were full of injured Union troops (injured Confederate troops got inside facilities). Wilson’s mother and older sister spent time nursing injured troops. Tommy Wilson could easily see (and hear and smell) the carnage from the home’s upstairs windows, and it’s easy to imagine that a seven-year-old boy would sneak across the street to see up close the goings-on behind the stockade fencing. What he witnessed there would weigh heavily on him when he was weighing whether or not to enter the US in WW I.
The home saw many uses and changes over the 130 years after the Wilsons left, so it needed extensive restoration to restore it to a circa 1860 appearance. It was lovingly redecorated, and 13 items in the house are from the time the Wilsons lived in it having been kept in storage by the church after the home was no longer used as a manse.
The paint colors on the walls were determined by careful spectroscopic analysis and thus are considered to be accurate to the period.
It opened as a house museum in 2001, operated by the City of Augusta.
