NIXON LIBRARY : THE BIRTHPLACE : Little White House Deemed Library Heartbeat

When Richard M. Nixon steps into his birthplace during opening ceremonies for his presidential library, it will be as if he had never left home.

There, in its original position against a living room wall, will be the piano Nixon practiced on as a boy. In the kitchen will be the same highchair in which he and his brothers once sat to eat. And in the bedroom of his parents, Frank and Hannah Nixon, will be the very bed upon which Nixon was born 77 years ago.

The wood-frame farmhouse built by Nixon’s father in 1912 has been restored as a nearly identical replica of the home in which the former President spent the first nine years of his life before the family moved to Whittier. Even the same pepper and palm trees still shade the simple house.

“It is the Nixon family and does reflect the family and what it possessed,” said Ken Raymond, a partner in the San Francisco firm that restored the former President’s birthplace.

Dwarfed by the sleek new presidential library next door, the little white house is nevertheless considered a prominent feature of the $21-million Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace. According to officials of the Nixon library foundation, the library would not be in Yorba Linda were it not for the birthplace.

“We sort of view it as the heartbeat of the library,” said Raymond, of the historical restoration firm of Brown, Raymond, Boulton & Szabo. “It is where he was born. The house is a singular expression of the President’s roots.”

The house shows the humble beginnings from which Nixon ascended to the presidency. The family lived in poverty under the crushing weight of medical expenses for two of Nixon’s seriously ill brothers, said Stephen Ambrose, a University of New Orleans historian who has authored two Nixon biographies. One of Nixon’s five brothers died in childhood, Ambrose added.

“He’s our last log cabin President,” Ambrose said.

Spartan by today’s standards, the 900-square-foot house does not contain a bathtub and is so compact that almost the entire ground floor can be viewed from the living room. Upstairs is the cramped attic loft where Nixon slept with his brothers.

As basic as the house is, restoring the home to its original condition was no easy feat. The project, which took more than 20 years to complete and cost about $450,000, involved everyone from restoration experts to a network of Nixon family members who gathered heirlooms to re-create the rooms the Nixon boys played in.

Efforts to salvage the old house first began in 1968, when Nixon won the Republican presidential nomination and civic leaders in his hometown of Yorba Linda recognized the historical importance of the home. By that time, it had been occupied by a series of people, many of them custodians for the Richard Nixon Elementary School that formerly occupied the library site.

Roland E. Bigonger, a Yorba Linda city councilman and local lawyer, joined with five other civic leaders in forming the Nixon Birthplace Foundation.

Although the Yorba Linda School District owned the home, Bigonger, now 68, and still a councilman, said the district allowed the birthplace foundation to maintain and repair it. The foundation put in a standing offer to buy the home if the district ever wanted to sell it.

When Nixon was elected President in the fall of 1968, Bigonger said, the foundation erected a flagpole next to the house and installed a plaque noting the site as a presidential birthplace.

At about the same time, Nixon’s sister-in-law, Clara Jane Nixon, set about gathering furniture, books and other belongings that Frank and Hannah Nixon had used to adorn their Yorba Linda home. Clara Jane Nixon, 70, widow of Nixon’s late brother, Donald, said the vast majority of the items fell into her hands after Hannah Nixon’s death in 1967.

“Richard had just a few things he wanted,” said Clara Nixon of Irvine. “The rest of it we didn’t know what to do with.”

With her brother-in-law about to become the nation’s 37th President, Clara Nixon said, she decided to store most of the belongings in the garage of the home she and her husband had in Newport Beach, anticipating that some day the items would be historically valuable.

She also put out the call to other family members for heirlooms. It turned out that her daughter in Yorba Linda had the family’s original dinner table. One of Hannah Nixon’s sisters was using the family’s china cabinet. The bed on which Nixon was born--and an 1875 quilt used to cover it--were found hanging in Nixon’s grandparents’ barn in east Whittier.

After three years of safeguarding the family keepsakes, Clara Nixon decided to turn them over to the Nixon Birthplace Foundation, which put the items into storage in a Santa Ana warehouse.

After Nixon’s resignation in 1974 amid the Watergate scandal, Bigonger said, the birthplace foundation entered into what he calls its dark period. For the next three years, he said, foundation members gathered as usual in Bigonger’s Yorba Linda law office, but the meetings were perfunctory and accomplished little.

“We just tried to hang on,” Bigonger said.

Events began picking up again in 1977 when the Yorba Linda School District agreed to sell the Nixon farmhouse and its 1.1-acre tract for $125,000. (The Nixon Elementary School was demolished about four years ago because of declining enrollment.) Until 1988, when the birthplace foundation merged with the library foundation, the house was occupied by maintenance workers who took care of it in lieu of paying rent, Bigonger said.

While ground was being broken for the adjoining library in 1988, Raymond and his staff of designers and architects took a look inside the old farmhouse to assess what it would take to restore the place.

Raymond said the group was in for a shock.

“It was a complete disaster,” said Raymond, who directed the interior restoration. “It had not been loved for many years.”

The biggest problem, he explained, was that each occupant of the home had made modifications over the years that, when combined, completely altered the house. Walls had been torn down, doors and tiling had been added and a shower and tub had been installed where, in Nixon’s youth, there had been only a wall-mounted sink. And the kitchen had been expanded to include the room where Nixon’s mother did her canning.

Outside, architects encountered another formidable challenge: virtually all of the wood siding was rotted and had to be replaced, said George Szabo, a San Diego architect and partner in Raymond’s firm which directed the outside restoration. Window frames and the shingle roof also needed replacing, Szabo said. And the concrete foundation that Frank Nixon had poured nearly 80 years earlier was so badly deteriorated that the house had to be lifted up and a new foundation poured, he said.

The original structure of the house, however, remained intact. The chimney was solid. The original trim around the exterior and some floors, walls and plaster on the inside were also in good enough shape to remain in place, Szabo said.

“The (original) craftsmanship was excellent,” Szabo said. “It’s impressive the way it came out. We just brought it back to what it was.”

In their restoration work, Raymond and Szabo relied heavily upon advice from the former President. In a three-hour meeting at Nixon’s New Jersey home last October, Raymond said the former President was adamant on a number of points.

“He would say, ‘This item was here and this item was there,’ ” Raymond said. “He was very, very clear.”

Nixon, for example, remembered that walls of the home were painted white. The former President also vividly recollected a living room arrangement in which the piano, though barely fitting, was next to the bedroom doorway and a large round table was pulled away from the wall for dining, Raymond said.

In the kitchen, Nixon also recalled a large wood-burning stove, an oak icebox and sink. He remembered that there had been a small, adjoining room where his mother spent long hours canning and preparing meals. A sitz bath stored in one corner of that room was used by Hannah Nixon to bathe her children, Nixon told the restorers.

Even though the public will not be allowed upstairs because the stairway is too narrow and delicate to sustain heavy foot traffic, Nixon also wanted his boyhood room restored. The furniture there was sparse: two beds, a small chest and chair. A built-in shelf was used as a desk.

“He said there was hardly any room in there to turn around,” Raymond said.

Using Nixon’s recollections as a guide, Raymond said he furnished the house as closely as he could to match the original. More than 90% of the furnishings were in the house at the time the Nixons occupied it, Raymond said. Other items, including the stove and beds in the boys’ room, were not the family’s but are representative of the same period, he said.

After the restoration was completed in June, Clara Jane Nixon accompanied reporters on a tour of the Nixon farmhouse. Standing in the living room that she had heard so much about from her late husband, she nodded her head in satisfaction.

“We always dreamed of opening the little home to the public,” Clara Nixon said. “Now you’re going to see this happen.”

NIXON BIRTHPLACE

The small, white house where Nixon was born remains standing on its original site. Visitors may enter the home and see many original furnishings, including the family piano and the bed on which Nixon was born. Nixon recalls life in the home through an audio program played in the house.