When the practice of the law in Atlanta failed to interest Wilson and did not seem to offer a clear route to the political world, he decided that a PhD from the Johns Hopkins University would open new doors. He had already succeeded in publishing his senior paper at Princeton on government and several articles during his time at Charlottesville. In the fall of 1883 he gave up on the law, parted from his fiance, and moved to Baltimore to pursue a degree in hopes of becoming a professor.

Here at the museum, we often meet people who are traveling the United States in order to see the many presidential sites around the country. That recently got me thinking that you really could do a good tour of the East Coast just by focusing on the life of Woodrow Wilson. Stretching from Atlanta to Middlebury, Connecticut, the homes of Woodrow Wilson could show the dramatic changes that happened in our country just by tracking the lifetime of one man who lived from before the Civil War to middle of the 1920s. He was born into a household where the work was done by enslaved people and he led the world to forge mechanisms for international peace and to outline the steps to start decolonization.

For more than fifty years, historians have discussed whether President Woodrow Wilson had dyslexia or some other type of difficulty reading. As a young boy, Tommy Wilson was considered stupid by some because of the hard time he had learning, though his parents remained confident of his abilities. Wilson told his wife later in life that he did not read until he was nine, and one of his daughters remembered him saying that he was not a confident reader until he was twelve. During his years in college, he complained of how slowly he read, and some have considered his enthusiasm for shorthand to be a sign that it freed him from the slow and troublesome work that taking notes presented him with. President Wilson often insisted on preparing drafts on his own, even for run-of-the-mill letters, though he usually did this on his personal typewriter or using shorthand.

Here in the Library and Research Center, we have quite a few books that are older than you might expect. Not only have there been efforts to acquire volumes that represent what President Wilson’s father, Joseph R. Wilson, would have had in the Manse when working as a Presbyterian minister in Staunton in the 1850s, but donations have come in to us from the wider Wilson family and from collectors of anything ever owned by Woodrow Wilson.