Harry Truman and Independence, Missouri: “This Is Where I Belong”

Harry S Truman (1884–1972) spent 64 years of his life in Independence, Missouri. The values he absorbed there as a boy and young man guided him as a farmer, a county judge, a U.S. senator and, from 1945 to 1953, President of the United States. When he left office he went home to Independence, to live among the family and neighbors he had always kept close.

Growing up (1884–1906)

Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, on May 8, 1884. In 1890 his family moved 120 miles north to growing Independence, partly so the children could attend graded schools instead of a one-room country schoolhouse. He later credited his teachers with giving their pupils high ideals for very little pay.

He was close to his family, especially his mother, who taught him to read and to play the piano; with no radio or television, the family made its own music. Harry read constantly — history above all — and later claimed, only half joking, to have read every book in the town library.

The Truman house, 1904. Harry S Truman Presidential Library.

At 14 he took his first paying job, at Clinton’s drugstore on the town square, for three dollars a week. An excellent student, he wanted to go to college, but his family could not afford it. After graduating in 1901 he worked a string of jobs and then as a well-paid bank clerk in Kansas City, until in 1906 he moved to the family farm at Grandview — hard work for someone used to the city.

National Park Service.

Change and challenge (1906–1934)

From the farm he stayed close to Independence. By 1910 he was courting Bess Wallace, whom he had loved since grade school and who lived across the street from his aunt and uncle; some visits meant a two-hour trip each way.

In World War I he trained in Oklahoma in the fall of 1917, shipped out to Europe in March 1918, and rose to captain commanding almost 200 artillerymen. He never forgot, he said as president, the strain, the mud and the misery of the soldier in the field.

Home in the spring of 1919, he married Bess at Trinity Episcopal Church, and the couple moved into the Wallace house at 219 North Delaware Street with her mother and brother. His Kansas City men’s clothing store, opened with an Army friend, failed in 1922, leaving him $20,000 in debt — which he refused to escape through bankruptcy and repaid in full over the next decade.

With family and friends behind him he went into politics, winning election as eastern judge of Jackson County in 1922; after losing a re-election bid, he became presiding judge in 1926, and studied law at night out of respect for the job. The post was like a county commissioner’s today. Believing every farm should be within 2.5 miles of a paved road, he raised $6.5 million for roads, helped finance a renovated courthouse in Independence and a new one in Kansas City, ran Depression public works, and produced a six-county regional plan that became a model for planners.

He had been elected with the backing of Thomas Pendergast’s Kansas City political machine, which rigged primaries and bought officials. Truman saw fellow judges take money, and privately agonized over whether getting things done made him a compromiser. At times he looked the other way to reach his goals, but he never profited personally; he kept his association with Pendergast in the open and conducted himself with such integrity that voters kept electing him after the machine collapsed.

Senator and president (1935–1952)

Truman was sworn in as a U.S. senator on January 3, 1935, in the depths of the Depression, and supported the New Deal. He found that the Senate’s real work was done by quiet, conscientious members, and on the Interstate Commerce Committee drew on his road-building experience to support good railroads and highways. From 1941 to 1944 he led the Truman Committee, which rooted out waste and unfair practices among defense contractors and saved taxpayers millions of dollars — work that led Franklin Roosevelt to choose him as running mate for a fourth term in 1944.

After only 82 days as vice president, Truman became president when Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. The next day he told reporters, “I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets fell on me.” He oversaw the end of the war in Europe, the occupation of Germany and the founding of the United Nations, met Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam, and — though he had not known the weapon existed when he took office — decided to use the atomic bomb against Japan to end World War II.

He launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, countered Communist expansion in Greece and Turkey (the Truman Doctrine) and through the Berlin Airlift, and recognized the new state of Israel. Almost no one expected him to beat Thomas Dewey in 1948, but he took his case to the people on a famous “Whistlestop” train tour and won. His second term was dominated by containing Communism: he formed NATO, and in 1950, in what he called his hardest decision, sent American troops to defend South Korea. At home he faced labor unrest and McCarthyism, and advanced civil rights by ordering the desegregation of the armed forces.

Through it all he kept up with Independence by letter — urging a friend who ran a local gas station to take good care of himself, because the corner of Union Street and Maple Avenue would not be the same without him — and the house on Delaware Street served as the “Summer White House.” In 1952 he chose not to run again.

Courthouse Square, Independence, 1909. Library of Congress.

Home again (1953–1982)

On January 20, 1953, after watching Dwight Eisenhower sworn in, private citizen Truman took an afternoon train home. Two days later 10,000 townspeople met Harry and Bess at the Independence depot, and thousands more at the house. If this is what you get for all those years of hard work, Bess remarked, it was worth it.

Retirement had a routine: a brisk walk at dawn, greeting neighbors and the tourists who waited at the gate — he said he would miss them if they stopped coming — then his office in Kansas City, where he wrote his memoirs and raised money for the Harry S Truman Library, which opened near his home in 1957 and became his office. Evenings meant piano, records and reading — history for him, mysteries for her. Visitors ranged from Presidents Hoover, Johnson and Nixon and Eleanor Roosevelt to Jack Benny, Bob Hope and Henry Fonda.

Harry Truman died on December 26, 1972, at 88. Bess stayed on in the house, where Presidents Ford and Carter called on her, and died on October 18, 1982, at 97. Both are buried in the courtyard of the Truman Library.

The house today

Bess Truman left the 14-room Victorian house, built by her grandfather in 1885, and most of their possessions to the people of the United States. In 1983 Congress created Harry S Truman National Historic Site, and Park Service rangers now guide 50,000 to 60,000 visitors a year through a home that holds much of a collection of more than 50,000 objects — furniture, books, records, photographs, clothing and Truman’s last car. The surrounding neighborhood, which looks much as it did in the Trumans’ time, is the Harry S Truman Historic District, a National Historic Landmark.

The Truman Home today. National Park Service.

The Truman neighborhood today. National Park Service.

Sources

Based on "Harry Truman and Independence, Missouri: ‘This is Where I Belong’," a Teaching with Historic Places lesson, National Park Service, drawing on the Truman Papers and on published biographies and memoirs; rewritten in hubnx’s own words. The source describes Truman’s first judgeship as a four-year term yet has him losing re-election and winning again in 1926, and calls the house the work of Bess Truman’s “paternal” grandfather; the page gives neither detail. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.