Reading this week:

• His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life by Jonathan Alter
• Remote Corners by Harry Mitchell

Our continuing staycation non-journey brought us to the Woodrow Wilson House in DC. This is the house that Woodrow Wilson lived in post-presidency. We went because my super amazing wife is a fan of presidential sites and hey this one was there!

The tour we went on was the “Three Generations of Wilson Women” tour because in addition to presidents my super amazing wife likes women. Plus is was the only tour that worked with our schedule that day but we would have been delighted to go anyways. We were joined by a woman who was on her second Wilson House tour for the day along with three foreign women who I guess were hitting the highlights of America. I don’t know if the other tours the house offers focused much on Wilson’s politics but this one mostly skipped it in favor of telling the story of Wilson’s life via the women that surrounded him. And he seemed to have a pretty good chunk of women surrounding him. He had three daughters with his first wife and the tour also takes time to focus on Mary Scott who worked for the Wilsons along with her husband Isaac.

The place is called the Woodrow Wilson House but it was really more the Edith Wilson house. Like I said Wilson moved here post-presidency in 1921 and then died in 1924. He had married Edith while president in 1915. She was 16 years his junior and a whopping 14 years older than his eldest daughter and outlived him by 37 years, dying in 1961. She very much liked being Mrs. Wilson (according to the tour) and spent the next few decades after Wilson’s death sprucing up the house and preserving her version of his legacy.

As house tours go, I guess it is a pretty nice house? I haven’t seen the inside of many of these sorta embassy row mansions so hard for me to compare. The staycation, besides featuring very nice floors also featured a good number of tapestries, including at least one large one in this house. The most popular spot was the lovely little sunroom at the top of the stairs that looked out over the garden, and as you can see it was a great spot for pictures:

The final detail I’ll note is that up in Edith’s bedroom I saw a statue and then a painting of Pocahontas which our guide hadn’t mentioned but from having recently gone to the Museum of the American Indian I had learned that a good chunk of well-to-do Virginians liked to claim descent from Pocahontas (nee Amonute). This caused problems when Virginia was starting to implement some hella racist laws saying anyone with non-white descent was going to be non-white, which would have included these well-to-do Virginians until the lawmakers included a carveout. Oh racism. Anyways I spotted these Pocahontas things and asked and one of those well-to-do Virginians claiming descent from Pocahontas included Edith Wilson, so there is some cross-museum synergy for you.

And that was pretty much the Wilson House. The staff there are passionate and are working hard to highlight the diverse aspects of the house and Wilson’s legacy though as long as we have a culture that glorifies “Great Men” you are only going to be able to do so much. Nice paintings though!