Calvin Coolidge’s grandfather, Calvin Galusha Coolidge, felt so strongly that tilling the soil was "the only real, respectable way to get a living" (15), and hoping to keep Calvin from going into trade as his father John had, deeded "forty acres, called the Lime Kiln lot…. With the rest (of the farm) to my lineal descendants, thinking that as I could not sell it, and my creditors could not get it, it would be necessary for me to cultivate it."1

…."My own wish was to keep store, as my father had done.

They all taught me to be faithful over a few things. If they had any idea that such a training might some day make me a ruler over many things, it was not disclosed to me. It was my father in later years who wished me to enter the law…" (16 –17)

Calvin evidently believed that "it takes a village to raise a child" though the saying was not coined until the second half of the twentieth century.

"The neighborhood around the Notch was made up of people of exemplary habits. ….speech was clean….lives above reproach. ….no mortgages. ….credit was good and …money in the savings bank. ….(worked from dawn until dusk). ….kept up no church organization….(so) little regular preaching (or) outward manifestation of religion through public profession, but…a people of faith and charity and good works. They cherished the teachings of the Bible and sought to live in accordance with its precepts.

The conduct of the young people was modest and respectful." (17)

Calvin attended regular Sunday school classes superintended by his grandmother Sarah Brewer Coolidge and later by his father. He spent a lot of time with her at her farm…."she had much to do with shaping the thought of my early years. ...The Puritan severity of her convictions was tempered by the sweetness of a womanly charity. There were none she ever knew that had not in some way benefited from her kindness." (17-18)

From his mother, Victoria Moor Coolidge, he learned to love the beauty of nature. The purple sunsets, evening stars, and the colors of each season so richly displayed in the fields and on the mountainsides of Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Upon her death in March 1885 when Calvin was only twelve years old, he records in his autobiography, "The greatest grief that can come to a boy, came to me. Life was never to seem the same again." (13)

In the early fall of 1891 just before Calvin began his freshman year at Amherst, his father married Carrie Brown, "One of the finest women of our neighborhood. I had known her all my life. I was greatly pleased to find in her all the motherly devotion that she could have given me if I had been her own son. …Loving books and music she was not only a mother to me but a teacher. For thirty years she watched over me, welcoming me when I went home, writing me when I was away, and encouraging me in all my efforts." (52)

At the age of thirteen having mastered the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic, and United States History at the Notch School, Calvin looked forward eagerly to attending Black River Academy in Ludlow. He would be mostly his own master – no more farm life drudgery – no more cowhide boots.

But as he notes there were other "atmospheres more monotonous and more contaminating than anything in the physical atmosphere of country life." (32) He would discover this later in life when it was a joy for him to return to his roots at the farm for vacations. For now, at age thirteen, he was "perfectly certain that I was traveling out of the darkness into the light." (33)

He relates his final thoughts written in 1929 over his "village upbringing."

"We have much speculation over whether the city or the country is the better place to bring up boys. I am prejudiced in behalf of the country, but I should have to admit that much depends on the parents and the surrounding neighborhood. We felt the cold in the winter and had many inconveniences, but we did not mind them because we supposed they were the inevitable burdens of existence. It would be hard to imagine better surroundings for the development of a boy than those which I had. …

Country life does not always have breadth, but it has depth. It is neither artificial nor superficial, but is kept close to the realities." (33)

Endnote

1 The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge. Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, New York, N.Y., 1929, 1989 edition, p. 15. This and subsequent

quotations from the Autobiography are used with the gracious permission of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation, Plymouth Notch, VT