President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site

Regions 3, 4, & 5 Park Cultural Landscapes Program

Inventory Unit Description: President William Jefferson Clinton (Bill Clinton) Birthplace Home (WICL) is located in the city of Hope Arkansas, approximately 110 miles southwest of Little Rock, Arkansas. The .68 acre site contains the Birthplace Home (Cassidy House), the visitor center, a comfort station, and the Virginia Clinton Kelley memorial garden. WICL was established by the National Park Service (NPS) in 2010 to interpret the early life and development of the forty-second president of the United States (Oculus 2014). During the early years of Bill Clinton’s life, the area was a typical mid-century neighborhood in a small southern town, with streets lined with single-family homes and shade trees. Clinton spent the first four years of his life living with his mother and maternal grandparents in the two-story, wood frame Cassidy House on South Hervey Street. Clinton and his mother moved to a new house in Hope after she remarried in 1950, however, the Cassidy House and the surrounding block, remained the locus of family until the death of his grandfather in 1956. Clinton’s grandfather, Eldridge Cassidy, owned and operated a local ice delivery service and neighborhood grocery. Cassidy’s store not only served the white population of Hope, but the African-American population, too. Clinton spent a great deal of time at his grandfather’s store and remembers Mr. Cassidy treating all customers as equals and with the same respect. In addition to equality, Mr. Cassidy would also forgive debts and frequently shipped extra food in orders to family of need (Oculus 2014 p. 14). Cassidy House likely functioned as the hub of Mr. Cassidy’s progressive ideology of “social justice”, exposing the young Bill Clinton to practices that would shape his future political career. Bill Clinton’s childhood friend, Vince Foster, lived next door to Cassidy House. The two boys shared a yard, strengthening the importance of the larger block on which Cassidy House sits. Foster would later follow Clinton to Washington and served as deputy White House counsel until his death in 1993 (Oculus 2014 p. 14). The land comprising the WICL site and surrounding neighborhood has changed over the years since Bill Clinton’s birth in 1946. The residential streets have given way to light commercial development and Hervey Street has been widened from two to four lanes to provide better access to nearby Interstate 30. Due to these changes, Cassidy House’s block appears as a residential island, lacking the same context as it did in the mid-twentieth century. Further, the block has been greatly altered with the removal of a house on the northwest corner and the addition of the recently constructed Virginia Clinton Kelley memorial garden in its place. Other changes include the loss of a house on the southwest corner of the block and numerous outbuildings and changes to the yard of the Birthplace Home. Due to these shifts within the landscape, it no longer retains sufficient integrity as a cultural landscape. Instead, the property can be read has a house museum with supporting visitor amenities.

President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site

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