Truman Family Farm, National Historic Landmark

The Truman Family Farm is currently operated by the National Park Service to share the history of the future president's formative years. At the age of twenty-two, Truman left a job at a Kansas City bank in order to contribute his labor to his family's farm. Here he shared a seven-bedroom home with his parents, grandmother, brother, and sister. The house had no plumbing or electricity and Truman recalled in his memoirs that his room was extremely hot in the summer and cold in the winter. In 1914 he wrote, “It was an awful task to arise this morning in that ten-degree room,” Truman lived and worked on the farm for eleven years and was in charge of feeding the livestock and milking the cows every morning before helping with breakfast. After breakfast, he would spend the day working on the farm until the evening when the family gathered together to read, talk, or play the piano and sing.

The Truman farm was a 600-acre farm that Truman worked on for 11 years. He did a variety of different jobs while on the farm and earned a reputation for hard work in the local area. Solomon Young, Harry Truman's maternal grandfather, built the original farmhouse built on the land by Solomon Young, Harry Truman's maternal grandfather, built an impressive home on the land in 1867. That structure was destroyed by a fire in 1893 and replaced with the current farmhouse. Between 1922 and 1940 over 200 acres of the farm were sold off to developers until the bank foreclosed on the property in 1940. In 1946, President Truman and his siblings started buying back the farm and by the early 1950s, they owned 529 acres of the original 600. However, between 1955 and 1958 they sold most of the land back to developers who built Truman Corner's Shopping Center. 

Jon E. Taylor. Truman's Grandview Farm. Charleston: History Press, 2013.

Listing of National Historic Landmarks By State. National Parks Service. Accessed April 24, 2019. https://www.nps.gov/nhl/find/statelists/mo/MO.pdf.

The Truman Farm House. Harry S Truman Presidential Library. Accessed April 17, 2019. https://www.trumanlibrary.org/places/gv31.htm.

The Truman Farm. National Park Service. Accessed April 16, 2019. https://www.nps.gov/hstr/learn/historyculture/truman-farm-home-photo-tour.htm.