The two-story, wood frame house on Hervey Street was where Clinton lived from his birth in 1946 at Julia Chester Hospital until age 4. The home was occupied until it was acquired by the Clinton Birthplace Foundation during Clinton's presidency.

The dwelling, which opened as a museum in 1997, conveys a lived-in feeling and is furnished with items that date to the late 1940s, when Clinton lived there. A separate visitor center with a gift shop was added later.

The South Hervey Street home served as the center of Clinton's family life for his first 10 years. After moving, Clinton spent summers there, visited on weekends, and attended other family gatherings there until his grandfather, Eldridge Cassidy, died in 1956.

The one original piece of furniture from Clinton's time is the living room couch. While visitors are not permitted to touch or sit on the furniture, the home has no glass partitions or roped-off areas, preserving the ambience of a private home.

Museum director Martha Berryman says the people around Clinton provided him with his first notions of "social justice," a theme he carried through his political life and into his post-presidential work.

Displays include pictures of grandfather Cassidy's store, where he served white and black customers - an uncommon practice in Hope in those days. Cassidy was known to extend credit during hard times, and sometimes forgive debts or slip extra food into a family's order.

"This is not lost on a little child with wide eyes and big ears," Berryman says.

She produces a recent find - a snapshot of Clinton as a boy, standing in front of the house. The white paint on the house is peeling badly.

"He [Cassidy] couldn't afford to paint his house, but he could afford to let families have free food," Berryman says.

She regularly straightens out myths - including misperceptions that the family lived in poverty, that Clinton was born in the house, and that his father abandoned him. The future president's father, William Jefferson Blythe II, died in a traffic crash a few months before his son was born.

Visitors who come from around the world are moved by what they see, Berryman says, and have a sense of being someplace special.

"People want to stand on sacred ground," Berryman says.

The site will formally become part of the National Park Service next year, though it is already listed among other federal attractions.

A third of the museum's visitors come from outside the United States, Berryman says. People from 159 countries have visited.

South Hervey Street is four lanes and feeds traffic to Interstate 30. But in 1946, the neighborhood was dense with family homes and shade trees. Across the street from the home is a small used-car lot, with a tobacco store next to it. Down the road is a closed grocery store at the site of what was an ornate Methodist Church.

Other elements are the same as 60 years ago. The house still vibrates when trains pass on the nearby tracks, sometimes rattling photographs free from display panels in the adjacent visitor center. On sunny days, the bedroom of Clinton's mother, Virginia, is still bathed in light streaming through the five large windows. The room was hers as a teenager and again when she was a young bride. There's a bassinet to the left of the bed, where Virginia cared for Bill as an infant.

The museum also shows how quickly Clinton lost some of his connections to his youth and family life after he entered the White House. His mother died just after the Clintons' first Christmas in Washington. Hillary Clinton's father died in 1994 in Little Rock, where he and his wife had moved to be closer to the Clintons.

Vince Foster, a childhood playmate who lived next door and shared a yard with the Clintons on South Hervey Street, followed Clinton to Washington to serve as deputy White House counsel. Foster committed suicide in 1993; he had suffered from depression.

Among the photos in the visitor center is one of Clinton with his uncle, Henry "Buddy" Grisham. The two were quite close, knowing each other too well for the presidency to affect their relationship, Berryman says.

"Mr. Grisham never was really impressed," Berryman says, adding that the president would slip into Hope unannounced to spend afternoons with Grisham.

Grisham died in 1997, and Clinton gave the eulogy at his funeral in Hope.

The museum also owns the home where Clinton's stepfather, Roger Clinton, lived with Virginia, Bill, and his brother, Roger. That house isn't open to visitors, but an exhibit can be seen through the front window at 321 E. 13th St. The family moved to Hot Springs when Bill Clinton was 7.

In his autobiography, My Life, Clinton says the South Hervey Street home "certainly is the place I associate with awakening to life" and that it "still holds deep memories."

First Home Museum

117 S. Hervey St.

Hope, Ark.

www.nps.gov/nr/travel/

presidents

870-777-4455

About 11/2 miles from Interstate 30 interchange with U.S. Highway 278. Open Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and by reservation. Free, including guided tours.