President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site

Bill Clinton was not born in this house. William Jefferson Blythe III arrived on August 19, 1946, at Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, three months after his father was killed when his car left a wet road outside Sikeston, Missouri. The hospital building is gone, and a plaque marks its site. What stands at 117 South Hervey Street is the American Foursquare house built in 1917 for Dr. H. S. Garrett, who patterned it, the Park Service says, on a house in France where he had lived.

His maternal grandparents, Eldridge and Edith Cassidy, owned the house and raised him in it while his mother, Virginia, studied nursing in New Orleans. The family moved to its own home on Thirteenth Street in 1950. The house passed through other owners, was damaged by an electrical fire and stood vacant after 1992, and a foundation restored it and opened it as a museum on June 1, 1997. It reached the National Register in 1994 under a rare exception to the fifty-year rule. A fire that investigators suspected was arson heavily damaged it on December 25, 2015, and it reopened on July 30, 2016. The Interior Secretary accepted it as a national historic site in December 2010, and Clinton helped dedicate it on April 16, 2011.

Tours begin at the visitor center beside the house, which has an exhibit on his childhood and a bookstore. Rangers lead the thirty-minute walk through rooms restored to the late 1940s, including the nursery where he slept.