Saturday, June 4

            A campaign has begun to build a presidential library at Mount Vernon for George Washington’s papers and presidential memorabilia.  Presidential libraries as we know them today did not really start until President Hoover’s in his home state of Iowa.  President Reagan’s may have kicked off the wave of state-of-the-art facilities designed to attract visitors.  President George W. Bush’s is being built on the campus of Southern Methodist University.

            We went to see our first such libraries a couple summers ago going first to Austin for Lyndon Johnson’s on the University of Texas campus and then George H. Bush’s on the Texas A. & M. campus, stopping for a tour of the Blue Bell ice cream complex along the way.  (That’s the part the kids really liked.)  We hope to eventually see all of them.  Gerald Ford has one on the University of Michigan campus.

            The three presidents with the greatest personal libraries were probably John and John Quincy Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  One can see the Adams family library which is in the original building of its own at their family home in Quincy, Massachusetts and then some of Jefferson’s books are still at Monticello with the rest in the Library of Congress.