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Most people meet Wytheville, Virginia, zooming past it at 70 mph.
On East Main, Skeeter’s has been selling hot dogs with mustard, onion and chili since 1925.
Sit at the counter at Skeeter’s, and you are in the same building where a future first lady was born.
Farron Smith owns that building. She and her husband, Bill, bought it in 1989. It came with the hot dog shop. It also came with the second floor, where Edith Bolling was born on Oct. 15, 1872, the seventh of 11 children.
Smith did not need anyone to tell her what she had.
“We always knew it was the birthplace and knew its history, its place in history,” she said.
The Smiths formed a foundation in 2006. The Edith Bolling Wilson Birthplace Museum opened on Oct. 15, 2008, Edith’s birthday. In 2010 they bought the old George Wythe Hotel across the street, where Edith had stayed on her last trip home, and reopened it as the Bolling Wilson Hotel.
What they got into is a rare thing. No other first lady’s birthplace in Virginia is a museum, and only eight sites nationwide are devoted to the life of a first lady.
Most Americans who know Edith Wilson’s name know it for one stretch of time. On Oct. 2, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke. It paralyzed his left side. For the 17 months that remained of his term, Edith decided who saw him and what papers reached his bed. She called it her “stewardship.” Critics then and since have called it something else. Some have gone so far as to call her the “secret president,” or the country’s first woman president.
Smith knows how the story is usually told.
“She is criticized often for the role, maybe seen as overstepping her boundaries when the president suffered a stroke,” she said, asking people to remember what was missing.
“There was no legislation in place as to what would happen if a president was incapacitated,” she said.
She is right about that. The Constitution in 1919 had one convoluted sentence about presidential “inability” and no process for using it. The 25th Amendment, which spells out how power passes when a president is disabled, was not ratified until 1967.
Vice President Thomas R. Marshall wanted no part of it. Days after the stroke, Secretary of State Robert Lansing raised the question with the Cabinet. Marshall would not act unless Congress declared the office vacant and Edith and the president’s physician certified in writing that Wilson could not serve. Neither happened.
Then, in Smith’s telling, the doctors came to Edith.
“You must protect him from Congress and the public so he can recover,” Smith said, paraphrasing the advice. “And that she did. She first thought of him as her husband, secondly as the president, and she was trying to save his life.”
That account comes largely from Edith’s own memoir.
Rebecca Boggs Roberts, in her 2023 biography, “Untold Power,” wrote that Edith had been treated unfairly, Smith said, and set out to understand why she made the choices she did.
Edith Bolling Wilson died on Dec. 28, 1961.
Many of her people are still here; the Bolling family plot is in East End Cemetery, right behind the museum. Both of her grandparents are buried there, Smith said, along with a sister and many others.
That is what Farron Smith has spent nearly 40 years on: a house, saved. A complex woman who fled Appalachia and would find herself in the highest echelons of American power.
On Oct. 17, the museum unveiled the first phase of its restoration of the Bolling home.