619 South Crysler Avenue

Truman lived here with his family from 1890 to 1896, when he was 6 to 12 years old. The house was built by a man named Blitz. "...This house had a good deal of ground several acres around it," Truman’s cousin Mary Ethel Noland remembered, "and my uncle [John Anderson Truman, Truman’s father] always had a fine garden there. And he still traded in cattle because he could have them out on the farm out there and do his trading in Kansas City or wherever trading was good. [The Truman family] had a very comfortable life there. I remember [my uncle] bought a pair of goats for the little boys [Harry and his brother Vivian] and a little cart, and how we loved to ride in the goatcart. It was really a miniature farm wagon, and three or four small children could sit in it and enjoy quite a ride." (Mary Ethel Noland oral history interview, the Truman Library, 1965.)

One of the duties Truman took on at the Crysler Street house was rocking his baby sister to sleep. "…He rocked me to sleep…till I was four or five years old," Mary Jane Truman remembered. "We had a big old willow chair. It was big enough for him and me both to sit in the seat, and he’d put a pillow behind me and rock and rock and sing ‘Bye Baby Bye.’ Momma said I’d just get to sleep, and he’d try to [slip] his arm out [from behind me] and I’d bob up and he’d have to go through the whole process again. Then she said that he’d go out and play and then he’d get to thinking I couldn’t breathe, so he’d come back in and check on me to see if I was breathing." When Mary Jane got a little older, Harry taught her to ride his pony, called Beauty. (Mary Jane Truman oral history interview, Truman Library, 1975.)

Truman remembered probably his first political event during the time he lived in this house: "There was a cupola or tower on the northwest corner of the Crysler Street house and when [Grover] Cleveland was elected in 1892, the rooster weathervane on top of the tower was properly decorated and my father rode a gray horse in the torchlight victory parade." (Handwritten autobiographical manuscript, 1951-52, President's Secretary's Files.)

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