Bill Clinton’s Birthplace Achieves Historic Status

Billy Blythe’s Hope

Close to America’s center is a half-forgotten railroad town called Hope. Located just off Interstate 30, not so far from the Texas border, this Arkansas burg retains two notable claims to fame.

For one, its farmers grow whopping great watermelons. The biggest of them, in fact, weigh a good deal more than does the town’s other notable product, namely, favorite son Bill Clinton. He was born within Hope’s borders on August 19, 1946.

Historic Site Status

Effective January 1, 2011, the President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace on South Hervey Street entered the rolls of the National Park Service as its newest historic site, celebrating the early boyhood of the nation’s forty-second president. 

To be frank, the place is no Monticello. Built in 1917, the home is a classic foursquare, with three bedrooms upstairs and a living room, kitchen, and dining room down. If it isn’t a memorable architectural monument, its efficient design, with a squat pyramidal roof with wide overhangs, and the generous porch out front, conveys a sense of southern comfort.

Bill Clinton’s Early Years

The architectural story isn’t really the point here. When newborn William Jefferson Blythe III left Julia Chester Hospital a few blocks away, he and his mother, Virginia Dell Cassidy Blythe, arrived on her parents’ doorstep. A single-mother, Virginia had been widowed at the death of her husband three months earlier in an auto crash on a Missouri highway. For the next four, formative years, Billy lived with his grandparents, as his mother came and went (she was completing her nurse anesthetist training in New Orleans).

Both Edith and James Eldridge Cassidy would help shape their grandson’s character, but it was “Papaw” that Clinton’s remembers as shaping his values. In the dedication of his autobiography, My Life, written more than half a century later, former President Clinton cited Eldridge Cassidy as the man “who taught me to look up to people others looked down on, because we’re not so different after all.”