About the project

This House to the White House is a collaboration between photographer Matthew Albritton and writer Andrew B. Leiter that consists of photographs and essays exploring the birthplaces of all of the US Presidents. The presidential birth sites sprawl across the country through twenty-one states from Vermont to Hawaii. Each of the sites has a unique story to relate about the man who would become president.  The original photographs and essays explore the relationship of place and identity by connecting the locales and structures to the presidential childhoods in their cultural, historical, and biographical contexts.  In addition to the birthplaces, the photographs include a number of additional childhood homes as well.  Two simple questions unite the studies of the presidential sites and childhoods. Where did the presidents come from? What were their childhoods like?  As is often the case with simple questions, these have complex answers.

For most Americans, our knowledge of presidential childhoods is filtered through electoral politics as presidential hopefuls, campaign operatives, and the media attempt to shape and counteract biographical narratives crafted to attract voters. Of presidential origins and childhoods, Americans retain only a few mythologized cultural touchstones: the story of George Washington’s cherry tree and a sense of the log cabin childhoods of presidents such as Abraham Lincoln.  The biographies and photographs of this book re-imagine the presidential origins as removed from both the subsequent political campaigns and any romanticized notions of presidential childhoods.  The endurance of the cherry tree myth speaks to our general nostalgia for notions of childhood innocence and perhaps a more generalized desire for moral politicians, but most historians agree that the anecdote is a fabrication by the early Washington biographer Parson Weems. No evidence exists to indicate that Washington chopped down his father’s cherry tree or that Washington confessed to the misdeed because he could not tell a lie. 

Disentangling the realities from other mythologies, however, can at times be more challenging.  The endurance of the log cabin mythology, for example, speaks as much to a cultural fascination with both the American frontier and the rags to riches aspect of the American dream as it does to reality.  A number of presidents were indeed born in log cabins, including Andrew Jackson, Millard Fillmore, James K. Polk, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, and James Garfield.  Log cabins, however, were not indicative of poverty in early America. In terms of the presidential childhoods, these were often starter homes of young upwardly mobile families who owned the land on which they lived.  Presidents may have been born in log cabins but rarely were they living in one a decade later.

While the birthplaces can reveal origins of presidential identities, the sites and structures themselves are rich in architectural and cultural history, and their current states of preservation demonstrate a mixture of memorialization and, at times, neglect.  The birth home of the sixth president, John Quincy Adams, is the oldest existing original structure among the presidential birthplaces.  Built in 1663 in Braintree, Massachusetts (now Quincy), his birth home predates the adjacent birth home of his father John Adams by nearly two decades.  Although Harrison’s birth home, Berkeley mansion, was constructed in 1726, the plantation’s colonial history dates back to 1619 when early settlers established the first American Thanksgiving upon landing at the site.  Over a century and a half later, the plantation and the Georgian mansion were raided by British troops in the Revolutionary War and, another eight decades later, Union troops occupied the plantation during the Civil War.

Emphasizing both artistic and historical approaches to the sites and childhoods, the photographs and biographies provide multifaceted entry points into American history and culture as framed by the photographer’s lens.  Although some of the photographs lean toward documentary representations of the sites and structures, the majority of the photographs are interpretive considerations of the sites.  The black and white medium was chosen to accentuate the historical nature of the subject matter and to capture elements that connect the locales to their history with a maximum of visual appeal.  Light cast across original wood floors, the texture of hand-sawn siding, or the profile of a hand-made brick chimney against the sky—in addition to being visually interesting—are tangible links to the past.  Such photographs frame details that may have been present at the time when the president lived in the home, and the images, as a group, address the passage and preciousness of time. Simultaneously, the combined photographs of the birth sites speak to the persistence of the American dream and serve as a historical record of our country through architecture, land, and politics.

From George Washington’s birth in 1732 on a Virginia plantation through Barack Obama’s childhood in Hawaii during the civil rights era, the presidential childhoods reveal a historical narrative told from American home places and highlighting nearly three centuries of cultural transition from Colonial America to the present.

                                                                                                                                                                      --Andrew B. Leiter

“. . . a boy never gets over his boyhood, and never can change those subtle influences which have become a part of him, that were bred in him when he was a child.”

                                                                                          --Woodrow Wilson