21. Chester Arthur
While Garfield is commonly recognized as the last of the log cabin presidents, Chester A. Arthur was also born in a log cabin two years before Garfield on October 5, 1829. Soon after Arthur’s birth, however, the family moved from the cabin into an adjacent and newly built parsonage in Fairfield, Vermont, where Arthur’s father had accepted his first calling as a Baptist preacher. Arthur’s father was Scots-Irish and migrated to the United States via Canada. Political opponents of Arthur would later claim that Arthur was born in Canada and thus constitutionally prohibited from serving as president. Arthur’s father was an ardent abolitionist whose outspokenness may have contributed to his frequent relocations to new parishes in Vermont and New York. The Arthurs lived in seven different locales before the future president attended Union College at the age of sixteen. Arthur’s birth cabin has been lost, but the site is marked by a re-creation of the parsonage.
--Andrew B. Leiter
The Arthur site is the Northernmost birthplace located in the rolling hills of Vermont. It is a reproduction house in a small clearing at the end of a sparsely-traveled country road. The location is spectacular, the reproduction cottage less so. I had the site to myself on a cloudy afternoon and walked the grounds in spirals of increasing distance from the house, trying to convey how it nestles into its location. I can't imagine it has changed much in the last 187 years, still surrounded by farms and thick woods.
-Matthew Albritton