the second day of washington's presidential sites summit, including the president's talk with the press. up next we visit the home where bill and hillary clinton were married in the ozark mountains and learn how this house helped kick-start the career of america's 47th president. >> welcome to fayetteville, arkansas. we're at the clinton house museum just a little south of the university of arkansas campus. this house was built in 1931 by a local man named scottie taylor. would have been on the outskirts of town at that time during the depression, so this would have seemed like a fancy house for that era. the clintons actually bought this house in 1975 and did a little bit of remodeling, but for the most part the house is entirely original to 1931. the house became a national historic register property in

2010, and the street became clinton avenue in 2010 as well. this is the living room. this is the famous room where bill clinton and hillary rodham were married in front of this big window in 1975. bill bought this house while hillary was out of town, actually, and surprised her with it. she came back from visiting friends and family for six weeks, and he said, i bought that house you thought was pretty and now you have to marry me. i can't live there alone. and she said yes on the third try. that was his third try that he did that. the house again is original to 1931. so the floors, the windows, all of those things. while it is a big room for a living room, it is a small place to get married. and the clintons had only ten guests here for their wedding. it was the two of them, a couple close friends and family, and that was it. very modest.

one of our visitors' favorite things to see is the wedding dress. this is a faithful replica of hillary's original wedding dress and it was designed and made by connie fails, a little rock designer who was a longtime friend of the clintons. and hillary bought this dress the night before the wedding at her mother's insistence. she was just going to pull something out of the closet and her mother said, no, we have to go to the store. you have to get a nice dress for a wedding. so they pulled this jessica mcclintock gunny sack dress off the rack for $50. at the time of the wedding, hillary decided to keep her name and be called hillary rodham, which would have been unusual in 1955 in arkansas, and both the mothers hoped she would change her name to clinton, but she stayed rodham and bill was very happy about that. when bill and clinton came to

fayetteville, they had just graduated from yale law school and did about a year's worth of other things before coming here, but they were just a young couple like so many others. they didn't have any money, they didn't really have any furniture. they were just getting started in life and their lives were busy with lots of political activity, lots of friends, traveling back and forth to little rock and doing other kinds of campaign things. they also traveled a lot in those years. and so they didn't have a lot of money but they spent a lot of time building networks and friendships. the urge to participate in public service began very early for both bill and hillary. hillary was very active at wellesley in lots of political movements and campaigns, and her graduation address at wellesley made quite a national splash. it was fairly radical for her time. and she went on to yale law school and that's where she met bill, of course. and bill had started and knew that he was going to be a political animal from his high school years. and he actually met president

kennedy while he was at boys nation in 1963, just a few months before kennedy was assassinated, actually. and he was involved in lots of democratic initiatives all across the country, lots of campaigns, worked hard for mcgovern, for frank holt here in arkansas, for james william fullbright, so he always knew this would be the path he was going to take and he gained a lot of experience before running for office himself. before the clintons were married and bill was living east of town, he decided he would run for congress. and he talked it over with the dean of the law school who gave him his blessing and promised his support. and he had decided to run against john paul hammerschmidt. he had actually asked several other people to run against hammerschmidt, a very popular republican in the third district, and nobody else wanted to do it. they wanted to run for other things, and he finally decided

maybe it should be him. and everyone thought he was fighting a losing battle, and probably he was and he knew it, but he openly says he didn't think it could hurt his future chances at other offices, and he was absolutely correct. that early campaign in '74, he lost to hammerschmidt by only about 6,000 votes which was pretty remarkable for a newcomer against a very broad republican district. and he often says that losing that congressional election enabled him to go to the white house. if he had won the election for congress, he would have gone to washington and stayed there. but his decision to stay here in arkansas, be the governor, eventually led to his bid for the white house. one of the fun things about this room, the dining room, where most people would use it as a dining room, the clintons used it as campaign headquarters. bill had decided to run for

attorney general two years after losing to john paul hammerschmidt, and he had two primary contenders in the democratic primary, cash and jurnigan. he won quite handedly, actually, in the primary race and he did not have a contender in the election. so he's running his northwest arkansas part of the attorney general's campaign from here in the dining room. because he didn't have a general election opponent, he was able to work on behalf of jimmy carter in '76, and he was carter's arkansas chair, and carter went on to win 65% of the arkansas vote that year. during the time that bill was running the arkansas carter campaign, hillary actually went to indiana and ran the carter campaign there and helped set up campaign offices and things like that. so their lives were very much about political campaigns and working on behalf of democrats across the country.

bill became the attorney general rather easily in 1976, and two years later would become the governor in 1978. when bill and hillary were married, hillary kept her maiden name rodham which would have been unusual in 1975 in arkansas, of course, but even across the country. and she really kept her look and she wore glasses and no makeup and natural hair, that kind of thing. after bill lost his second term as governor in 1980, the two of them really regrouped, and you see at the beginning of the '80s her transformation and his transformation politically, thinking about what the people needed most and her tra transformation into what washington would think was an appropriate first lady. she changed her hair, started

wearing makeup. you can see her change of hair was very apparent in the 1980s, and clinton ran for governor and won that time. he was able to go back to the governor's office and had this new first lady with him. the clinton house museum is really the great american story. like so many others, it's a great example of the best of american ideals. people can start from nowhere and they can work hard and engage in public service, and they can do what it is they set their minds to. and when you get a chance to spend time in the same place that other people have lived, you get to absorb some of that energy and think about how people got started in their lives and where they would later end up. and so our visitors really love that idea. they like standing in this place where these two powerful people, these two really smart people spent their early days and were

plotting out their life's course in a house like this.

>> mic check 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, mic check.

>> mic check for c-span, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. mic check. we take you now to the virginia countryside for a visit to james monroe's highland.

the president lived here from 191 1873 until his death in 1931. >> i call it a presidential cold case. there are always questions about this house. architects look at the little house and say, you know, that doesn't really look like a wing of a president's house. it has formal similarities to other dependency buildings from other plantations. the questions that were really lingering. when i got here, there were answers to questions i asked that i didn't quite fully understand, and maybe it's just a willingness to say, you know, i don't understand that. because maybe it's perfectly clear and i just don't understand it. but actually saying i don't understand that, let's look further. so we're standing now in the

center of the spot where james monroe's original main house stood, and this is where we discovered those really well-preserved foundations just below the ground's surface. we covered it back up while we are not excavating. that's how we preserve a national site. we laid these papers on the ground to give you a sense of the footprint of the house. it's laid specifically right over the places that we have excavated, where we've identified the walls, and we've also speculated in between those spots. so this is the outline of the 1799 monroe house. we see some of the walls that we indicated are marked by these surface flagstones so that you can really get a sense of the relationship of this house to the smaller 1818 guest house that's behind the 1870s house. we excavated a couple dozen

squares around here, both interior and exterior. we dug around here last fall. you can see where the grass hasn't quite grown back yet. eventually our research will uncover this area and also the yard. because our work on the yard will be able to tell us a lot of the hactivities that were happening here and we'll get the house orientation. we don't know yet whether the main entrance was on this face or the southern face. but we certainly will be able to determine that. there is a smaller wing to the west that probably is more service oriented. it held a kitchen cellar, we think. the cellar itself we have not excavated. we're really eager to get into that and open it up. we'll have great discoveries there. and we have really good evidence of burning. we think the house was destroyed by fire sometime between the

mid-1830s and the early 1850s. and we have not yet found contemporary newspaper account of that destruction, which is somewhat surprising. so i know that any day someone is going to come up to me and have discovered the missing newspaper account. that will happen, i'm sure. so we found a chimney base. we found burnt planks. the archeological small finds are numerous. lots of nails which i figure have come from thomas jefferson's area at monticello, and there is good evidence corroborating that. lots and lots of ceramics, lots of wine bottles which, of course, is the container of the day. before plastic bottles, glass wine-type bottles were used over and over again for all kinds of liquid storage and transport. so lots of those. some ceramics, which is

interesting, that will tell us what the monroes were eating off of, the dishes that they used. that's always a really exciting moment to be able to understand the consumer choices that they made. so the house continues behind me here and probably goes under the 1870s house that belongs to the massey family. so it continues probably 20 feet or so underneath that house. and that was probably severely impacted by that construction in the 1870s. but otherwise, the part of the house that's not covered by that is really well preserved. and so it's an archeological treasure that i'm really eager to get into. james monroe is a really interesting character. he is maybe the most popular president of his time and one that is least known today. so we have a great challenge and

a great opportunity here to share his story. james monroe purchased the property in 1793. and when he was away, he was minister of france during the 1790s, and his good friend and mentor thomas jefferson and his other friend james madison were both involved in setting up the plantation prior to his moving here in 1799. james monroe and his wife, elizabeth cortwright monroe, moved here late in 1799. james monroe, unlike the other local presidents, did not grow up in this area. monroe himself is from westmoreland county out east. he was born in 1758 and moved here from fredricksburg where he had settled with his young wife just after their marriage. first they lived at a property that's now the grounds of university of virginia. we call it now monroe hill. and he lived in that place. and then this property became

available, and he saw it as being closer to jefferson, being a larger tract of land and hopefully more productive. he purchased the property in 1793 and moved hero officially late in the year of 1799. by the late 18-teens, he also had his property oak hill in loudoun county, and that was much closer to washington, so he went there more frequently. so during monroe's presidency when he came here, he very likely traveled with his wife. sometimes his elder daughter also accompanied him. of course, her husband, george h hay, was an important person to monroe being a confidant and secretary sometimes. so their family would come. they were certainly enslaved people during their lifetime. he claimed ownership of about 250 souls. that's cumulative. not at one time. and the enslaved work force here

varied in number based on what was happening with both monroe's properties. i think the thing that's important to recognize is that monroe's legacy is physically fairly diffuse. i mentioned the house in fredricksburg and he also spent time in new york city. he was born east in the state in westmoreland county. here highland was his home. so this represents his ministries abroad where he was minister to france, minister to england and briefly minister to spain, and also represents his time as secretary of state. he was, prior to that, a four-term governor back when that was allowed. he was elected to four individual one-year terms. and i mentioned secretary of state. and then eventually a wildly popular two-term president.

monroe was -- seemed to be an easy man. they say that he was able to put men and women at ease in social situations, so i think he enjoyed dinner table conversation and parlor conversations and really was kind. people said he had a great sense of humor. we see that in people's accounts of monroe. he seems to be able to poke fun at himself and at others. james monroe went to cable town academy, which was a good school. it was in westmoreland county and it really prepared colonial young men at that point for a real professional life. john marshall was, at least briefly, one of his classmates there. after both monroe's parents died by the time he was 16, then his maternal uncle, joseph jones, who was his first real mentor and role model, sent monroe

where he studied for about two years. i particularly like the story about monroe's start there. he should have been well prepared -- i want to say elite, but really good and well regarded school. but he got there and found that he was really deficient in one or more of his subjects and he was not quite ready and he was kind of disappointed. he wrote about this later, that he went home and revised or studied really hard over the summer and really worked hard to get to where he thought he should be. and when he came back, his professors were impressed. and he really, then, made the cut and was where he should have been. i think that's a real central piece to understanding monroe. here at highland, we've always understood that the standing house is not the entire monroe main house. of course, we thought it was part of the main house. we thought it was the remnant wing, a two-wing or two-rectangle structure.

and we know that from documentary sources. in particular a set of insurance documents. three of them, in fact, show sketches of two wings put together. and this clearly is one wing. and so when i started here in 2012, i really sought to understand the history of the property itself. okay, so the wing that's no longer here, we should be able to find traces of it underground. i wasn't really satisfied with the sense that it's there and we haven't found it. so i thought, well, let's keep looking, and we ended up excavating all the way around the main house. it was in the front of the 1970s house, that tall, victorian style building, that we found a big deposit of archeological debris. and we needed to open up larger excavations and really figure out where was the building that contributed that debris. and we were very lucky to find

well-preserved archeological foundations there. the structures that are on the property today come from the different phases of occupation. the monroe period buildings that we have are, of course, behind me, the presidential guest house, the building that man row had built for him when he was president. so in 1818, and he was coming here as president, he needed more space. i think when you travel as president, you have more people visiting you, you need more accommodations for people who either come with you or come to you while you're president. so the 1818 guest house is one part, and then that has a small one-over-one, one room over one room, white piece added to the eastern part, and then that connects to this large building, this taller yellow building that was from the 1870s. that's from a later owner. and the little white piece is

from the 1850s. we saw circular saw marks all over the framing of it and that gives us a good date and that's also confirmed by the addendum for the late 1850s. we have a smokehouse and we have later monroe buildings and reproduction buildings or reconstructions of buildings that were here historically. we do know the names and/or occupations of cumulatively about 250 people that were enslaved as part of monroe's lifetime ownings. there was a variety, of course. one of the things that we really appreciate is getting to know people's names and their specific occupations. for example, in the september 6, 1818 letter that james monroe wrote to son-in-law george hay, he talks about building the

presidential guest house. and he mentions one by name and the other by occupation of the two enslaved men who actually did that work. he speaks of a carpenter by judge brooks. we think his name was mallory. he also mentioned a man named george who may have been another carpenter or another craftsman. but knowing that these two were the people who were in charge of building the house that we still have standing really brings a richness to our understanding of the property and its history. we see people in the roles they play. we see the connections or not with the monroe family who ultimately saw them as labor but may have, in certain instances, seen these enslaved people as also people with whom they did share space. it's a very complex story, and

we do know some, but not enough. so we're still looking. the discoveries that we've made at highland are not only an opportunity to reexamine this site, which they are opportunit re-examine monroe himself. so we are very excited to really look back on what we thought we understand about mop roe. so our research is ongoing. you know, we continue to read and we continue to do archaeolo archaeolo archaeology. our two projects, neither of which are in the field at this moment are the larger landscape, including the slave quarter that we may have discovered there in the field. and what we want to do now is really raise the funds for the big phase, so the excavation that will take place over the course of a year or years and have it open for a month or two at a time, so that we can really look in and see the whole house open and really get into those

cellars, because it would be really crucial archaeologically to open those up and see whose stuff was in the cellar when the house was destroyed. of course, we think the house with us destroyed after monroe left. it seems all indications that it would have been between the 1830s and the 1850s. so, of course, you know, monroe was gone by then and was deceased. so we want to open that up, you know, the cellars will be able to tell us really in closer detail when the house was destroyed. will be able to tell us the finishes of the house, you know, the plaster, maybe the types of woodwork we can tell from the hardware, including the nails. so, you know, we have a long season of archaeological excavation ahead us, that we're in the development phase for, because we need the resources to be able to open that and keep it open for a good period of time. so, you know, our best days are still ahead of us.

and we look forward to the time when archaeology is a daily occurrence here and that's what people can see when they come. and back to the white house historical association's conference for a discussion of presidential legacies. white house historical association president stewart mclaurent talks with the head of the lbj foundation and laura bush's former chief of staff. this is a summit in washington, d.c., with representatives from historic presidential sites across the country. is