How much do we really know about the early years of America's leaders of the free world?

Here, we take a look at the sometimes surprising places where presidents spent their formative years. From Abraham Lincoln's modest one-room log cabin to Roosevelt's stately family seat, they're often not what you'd expect. 

Click or scroll to discover where America's presidents got their start in life...

Joe Biden came from more humble roots than some of his predecessors.

Born on November 20, 1942, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, into relatively modest circumstances, the tale of a scrappy kid from Scranton overcoming the odds was a narrative Barack Obama repeated numerous times when discussing his vice presidential pick during his 2008 campaign for the White House.

In 2021, Biden graduated from vice president to president and became the 46th leader of the US, beating incumbent Donald Trump.

Pictured here is the clapboard Colonial home in Scranton's Green Ridge neighbourhood where Biden spent the first 10 years of his life, under the watchful gaze of his maternal grandparents.

Biden was the eldest of four siblings. His father, Joe Sr., struggled to find work after the Second World War, forcing him to travel to Delaware to clean boilers for a heating and cooling company to support his growing family.

While they eventually relocated to Claymont, Delaware in 1953, it's clear Biden's time at the Scranton house had a profound impact on him.

The beloved residence remained in the Biden family until 1962 when Biden's uncle, Edward Finnegan, sold it to the current owners for $14,000, around $145,300 (£114k) in today's money. 

Pictured here when Biden visited his childhood home during the 2020 campaign trail, the current owners replaced the door number with 46 in support of the future president's plight for the executive office. 

The three-storey home features five bedrooms, two bathrooms and a basement, just enough space for the multi-generational family to spread out. During Biden's 2020 visit to the property, he left his mark on the house, quite literally.

Here, current owner Chris Kearns lifts a wedding portrait from the wall of the living room to reveal a signed message from the president, which reads: "From this house to the White House with the grace of God".

It's not the first time Biden has taken a pen to the walls of his formative home. In 2008, the then-vice presidential nominee scribed "I am home" on the wall of his childhood bedroom. 

A native New Yorker, Donald Trump was born on 14 June 1946 in the borough of Queens. The 45th and 47th president enjoyed a middle-class upbringing in the city suburbs along with his four siblings Fred Jr., Robert, Elizabeth and Maryanne.

His father, Fred Trump, had climbed the ladder to become a successful real estate developer and his earnings funded luxuries such as private schools for the children.

Trump's childhood no doubt laid the groundwork for his own real estate and political careers, the latter of which is now under the spotlight once more as the 2024 Republican presidential nominee challenges Biden for the White House, despite his recent criminal conviction.

For the first four years of his life, Donald Trump lived in this mock-Tudor house in the leafy and upscale Jamaica Estates neighbourhood of Queens. The property was built in 1940 by the future president's father.

Measuring some 2,500 square feet, the brick, stucco and half-timbered house has a total of five bathrooms and four-and-a-half bathrooms, a large living and dining room, a library, a sunroom, a basement and a two-car garage. 

The house was last sold in 2017 for just over $2.1 million (£1.6m), with the previous owner having bought the property a year earlier for just $1.4 million (£1.1m).

While Trump flirted with acquiring the house, it was snagged by a mystery Chinese investor and then listed on Airbnb several months after it sold in 2017.

For a time, the house was offered as a rental for $815 (£590) a night, but the New York Times reported that there appeared to be few takers as the house seemed to be empty most of the time.

Pictured here is the home's living room captured during a tour by the US TV show Inside Edition when the home was put up for sale back in 2016.

This snug bedroom featuring sash windows and wood floors gives an insight into the floor plan the young Trump family would've shared. 

After attempting to sell the house at auction in 2019 and 2020, it was put back on the market for $2.9 million (£2.3m) but was later withdrawn without a sale.

It finally sold in March 2025 for $835,000 (£616k), 40% less than its 2017 price.

Best known for becoming the first Democrat since Roosevelt to win a second presidential term, and for his subsequent high-profile impeachment, Bill Clinton certainly made waves as the 42nd President of the United States.

His hunger for success saw him graduate from the prestigious Yale University with a law degree, before entering politics in his hometown of Arkansas and ultimately beating George H W Bush in the 1992 presidential race.

But where did President Clinton spend his formative years? 

Born William Jefferson Blythe III, Clinton began life under tragic circumstances when his father died in an automobile accident three months before his birth on 19 August 1946.

Bill Clinton lived with his maternal grandparents for his first four years while his mother was studying nursing in New Orleans and eventually took on his stepfather's surname as a teen.

He spent his early years in this elegant house in Hope, Arkansas, which was built in 1917 by a doctor who designed it to resemble a house he'd owned in France.

The former president spoke candidly about his time at the property in this video shared by the National Park Service. "That little white house is where I learned to walk and talk and read and count, and to appreciate music," he revealed.

Spanning 2,100 square feet (195sqm), the attractive green and white two-and-a-half-storey house has six rooms. These include the living and dining rooms, which are decorated with intricate wood furniture and floral prints, the traditional kitchen, and three spacious bedrooms.

For the young future president, the house was a place of possibility. "I remember being upstairs and looking out the window at the train tracks and imagining a world that lay beyond my street," he told the National Park Service.

This is Clinton's childhood bedroom, complete with a wooden writing desk and a bed laid with a Hopalong Cassidy blanket.

The future POTUS left the property in 1950 when his mother remarried, but he continued to visit his grandparents at the Hope property until they passed away, after which it was sold.

In the 1990s it was bought by the Clinton Birthplace Foundation and designated a National Historic Site.

The president who steered the Union to victory in the Civil War and abolished slavery before his infamous assassination in 1865, Abraham Lincoln was born to hard-up pioneers Thomas and Nancy on 12 February 1809. While his start in life was humble, Lincoln made the most of his limited resources. 

"Of course, when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher … but that was all”, he's recorded as saying by White House historians. Lincoln's ceaseless determination led his business partner to describe him as a "little engine that knew no rest".

Lincoln was born in a run-down one-room log cabin on Sinking Spring Farm near Hodgenville, Kentucky, the homestead his parents had bought for a couple of hundred dollars the year prior.

Unlike many other presidential boyhood homes, which have been meticulously preserved for posterity, Lincoln's was unceremoniously torn down well before his rise to prominence, and no trace of it exists.

Instead, a 'symbolic' cabin was cobbled together on the site in 1895. This image, which dates from between 1915 and 1920, is thought to depict the replica.

The reconstructed cabin is now housed inside the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park in Kentucky.

The Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park also encompasses Knob Creek Farm, where the future president lived for a further five years of his childhood before the family relocated to Indiana in 1816. 

Pictured here, this basic timber cabin is another replica that resembles the type of structure Lincoln would've resided in during his early years on the frontier of Kentucky.

While both replicas are devoid of furniture and other contents, we can get an idea of the conditions in which young Lincoln lived from surviving photographs and artefacts.

This historic image from 1891 shows the interior of the log cabin where the 16th president was born.

The sparse space features rudimentary floorboards, an open hearth for cooking, and what is said to be a spinning jenny that belonged to Lincoln's mother, once used for spinning wool or cotton.

Staying with presidents who came from humble beginnings, Herbert Hoover, whose administration was upended by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression, was born on 10 August 1874.

The 31st leader of the United States was the son of a Quaker blacksmith and came into the world in remarkably modest circumstances, a stark contrast to the renown he achieved later in life.

Hoover was born in this picturesque but small white clapboard cottage in West Branch, Iowa. The future president's father, Jesse, built the house in 1871 with the help of his father Eli and operated a smithy across the street.

His unassuming roots stayed with Hoover throughout his career, and he made reference to the quaint home where he got his start in life numerous times. "This cottage where I was born is physical proof of the unbounded opportunity of American life", Hoover said.

The board-and-batten cottage measures just 20 by 14 feet (6m by 4.3m) and consists of only two rooms: a combined living room, dining room and kitchen, along with a separate bedroom.

Hoover lived in the cottage for three and a half years before the family relocated. He went on to purchase the home in 1935, two years after the end of his final presidential term, returning the cottage to the Hoover family once more.

Restoration work began in the summer of 1938. The property was returned to its historic state, with missing furniture replaced with similar antique pieces, and it was opened to the public.

Pictured here, the modest kitchen area features a butter churn, an old-fashioned metal stove, and a washboard that would've once been used to clean the family's clothes.

The bedroom has few creature comforts or luxuries apart from the wooden bed and cradle, a replica of the one baby Hoover slept in. Rag rugs cover the floors, and the home is lit by kerosene lamps.

There are patchwork quilts for warmth and a sewing machine table, which would have been something of a status symbol back in the 1870s, at least for the poorer in society.

In contrast to Lincoln and Hoover, Franklin D Roosevelt came from a privileged 'old money' background in Upstate New York.

The 32nd President of the United States, who held the executive office from 1933 to 1945, came from a family already acquainted with the route to the presidency.

FDR's fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, had already taken on the mantle of leader of the free world in 1901. 

FDR was born on 30 January 1888 at Springwood, the family's 33-acre estate in Hyde Park, New York. The estate was purchased in 1866 by FDR's father for $40,000 (£32k), a fortune at the time and the equivalent of around $788,800 (£617k) in modern money. 

The president, who is best remembered for guiding America through the Great Depression and the Second World War, lived at the property for the rest of his life.

The mansion originally had a grey clapboard exterior when the future president was born. However, the property was treated to a major makeover in the 1910s when it was extended and revamped in a grander Colonial Revival style.

During FDR's presidency, Springwood was a bolthole for the president. Known as the Summer White House, it hosted dignitaries including King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, who were treated to a hot dog picnic.

The home's largest space, the luxurious library houses parts of FDR's extensive book, coin and stamp collections. The chintzy drawing room is equally as fancy.

There's also a music room in the house brimming with valuable porcelain and lacquerware and the 'Snuggery', the room Roosevelt's mother commandeered as her relaxation and writing sanctuary.

FDR's childhood bedroom is shown here, one of the 18 bedrooms in the house. 

The only president to serve four terms gifted the estate to the nation in 1943 and it was designated a National Historic Site and opened to the public following his death two years later. FDR is buried on the estate and his presidential library and museum is located within the grounds.

The 35th leader of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was born on 29 May 1917 in Brookline, just outside Boston.

One of seven siblings, his childhood was one of relative comfort, though the future leader suffered frequent illnesses during his early years and reportedly almost died from scarlet fever.

JFK's birthplace was this handsome clapboard nine-room house on a leafy, residential street.

In the years since his death, the property has become a shrine of sorts to the former POTUS. The US leader, who paved the way for civil rights legislation but struggled at times to diffuse Cold War tensions, had his presidency brutally cut short by his assassination in 1963.

Kennedy's father, Joe, who at the time was cutting his teeth as a businessman and investor, bought the house in 1914 shortly after marrying JFK's mother, Rose. Back then, it cost him just $6,500, the equivalent of around $210,584 (£155.5k) in today's money.

The house was kitted out with all mod cons from indoor plumbing, gas and electricity to modern appliances and furnished in a traditional style.

A piano Rose received as a wedding gift is still displayed in the parlour, which is tastefully furnished, as are the dining room and bedrooms, particularly the lady of the house's second-floor boudoir.

A child who was often ill, JFK would have spent much of his time in the nursery, though he was actually born in the master bedroom. Two of his favourite childhood books, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table and Billy Whiskers and His Kids, can be spotted on a chair.

In 1920, the house was sold, and the Kennedys moved to a mansion several blocks away. Following the president's assassination, JFK's childhood home was reacquired by the family, who donated it to the National Park Service in 1967.

Richard Nixon, the president who will forever be synonymous with the Watergate scandal that led to his shock resignation, was born on 9 January 1913 in Yorba Linda, California.

The son of citrus farmers, Nixon was the second of five brothers and grew up in relative poverty. However, he was seemingly unaware of the family's financial struggles at the time and later in life, he often quoted a saying of President Eisenhower: “We were poor, but the glory of it was we didn’t know it.”

The 37th leader of the US spent the first nine years of his life here, in this characterful bungalow on his family's eight-acre citrus ranch. His parents, Frank and Hannah Nixon, built the residence in 1912 from a mail-order construction kit, a precursor to the modern flat-pack home. 

The one-and-a-half-storey house squeezes in a living and dining room, kitchen, pantry and sewing room, as well as two bedrooms. Nixon's parents slept in the ground-floor master bedroom, while the second, smaller room on the upper level was shared by the future president and his brothers.

The family's living and dining room is homely and traditional, showcasing precious china and ornaments that belonged to Nixon's mother.

The piano was Nixon's prized possession as a kid. A talented musician, he went on to compose a concerto later in life and even appeared on The Tonight Show to perform it, this time playing a pricey grand rather than a cheap upright. 

Like the other rooms in the bungalow, the upper-level bedroom the boys shared looks pretty much how it did when the president lived there.

The Nixons moved out in 1922, and the home changed hands several times before it was purchased in 1978 by a group of businessmen and donated to the Richard Nixon Foundation, which restored its original furnishings.

The home is now open to the public.

Jimmy Carter, who had a mixed presidency marred by economic stagnation at home and several crises abroad, spent much of his childhood in a modest farmhouse in Archery, Georgia. His father, Earl Carter, who went on to find success as a peanut grower, bought the farm in 1928 when the future president was four years old. 

Speaking of his childhood in 1975, Carter revealed: "My life on the farm during the Great Depression more nearly resembled farm life of fully 2,000 years ago than farm life today."

So the legend goes, Carter's dad had forgotten the key on the day the family were due to move into the homestead, so Earl got his young son to crawl through an open window to unlock the front door.

While the house is typical of a middle-class rural dwelling in the 1920s, it had no indoor plumbing or electricity for years.

The living room is sparsely furnished, with a three-seater sofa, piano, armchair and Art Deco wireless situated around a large brick hearth. 

In any case, the Carter family is likely to have spent the majority of their time outdoors helping to tend to the land. Earl cultivated a range of crops on the acreage, including corn, cotton, peanuts and sugar cane. 

Pictured here is the family's dining room. A fireplace, framed by an elegant carved surround, takes centre stage, while tall windows allow daylight to pour into the space. Note the sewing machine, which would likely have been used to make and repair clothes, bedding and other household linens.

Carter moved out in 1941 to go to college, and the farm was sold in 1949. It eventually came under the ownership of the National Park Service, which restored the property to its 1920s appearance and opened it to the public.

Decades before his two-term presidency which saw him dealing with the 9/11 attacks, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, George W Bush spent the early years of his childhood in small-town Texas.

The first son of future president George H W Bush and Barbara Bush, Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut on 6 July 1946, though the family upped sticks to the Lone Star state when the future leader was young.

The future 43rd president moved into this basic one-frame suburban home in Midland, Texas in 1951 at the age of five with his parents and siblings.

Bush Senior had relocated the family to the town to get himself established in the oil business but given he was just getting started, the future 41st president didn't have an awful lot of money to splash on a home.

In any case, the three-bedroom ranch-style property did just fine and proved to be more than ample for the growing Bush brood.

The open-plan living room, which is partly clad in 'knotty pine' panels, has a rustic stone fireplace and features a statement bow window and nook for reading and relaxing. The furniture looks comfortable and relaxing, and we can just imagine this family living room getting a lot of use.

During this formative period of his life, the future leader was affectionately known as Georgie. The Bush family is said to be an especially tight-knit clan. 

Other rooms in the house include the cosy den and the future two-term president's bedroom, which is clad in more rustic pine panels.

The Bush family lived in the house for four years before they left for a fancier pad as Bush Senior's business flourished.

In 2001, a local board of realtors bought the house, had it restored to its appearance when the family resided there and opened the property to the public in 2006.

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