Plymouth

On July 4, 1923, Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as the 30th President of the United States by the light of a kerosene lamp in his father's farmhouse in Plymouth Notch. It remains one of the most iconic moments in American presidential history — the simple transfer of power in a Vermont hill town, conducted by a father who happened to be a notary public.

Chartered in 1761, Plymouth sits in the hills of Windsor County, its terrain rising into the Green Mountains. The Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site preserves the Notch village essentially as it was in 1923: the homestead, the general store, the church, the cheese factory. Plymouth Artisan Cheese, revived in 2009, continues making the granular curd cheese that the Coolidge family produced.

With about 568 residents, Plymouth is rural and quiet, its population a fraction of what it was in the 19th century when hill farming was more viable. Town meeting carries on each March — the same form of self-governance that shaped Coolidge's famously laconic political philosophy.