Harry S. Truman Little White House in Monroe County, Florida

Photograph: “The Little White House”, Key West, Florida June 2021.jpg by Sharon Hahn Darlin · CC BY 2.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Monroe County attraction

Harry S. Truman Little White House

Monroe County · South Florida & the Keys

The house at 111 Front Street where President Truman spent a hundred and seventy-five days of his presidency.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Scott, McDermott and Higgs designed it and it went up in 1890 as the first officers' quarters at the naval station, a wooden duplex shared by the base commandant and the paymaster, made into a single house in 1911. Truman came eleven times between 1946 and 1953 and worked from here rather than resting; the desk with the sign reading that the buck stops here is on show. In 1948 James Forrestal met the Joint Chiefs of Staff in this house and thrashed out the agreement that created the Department of Defense. Other presidents used it too: Taft in December 1912, Eisenhower while recovering from a heart attack in 1955 and 1956, Kennedy in 1961 for a summit with Harold Macmillan and again after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Carter for a family reunion in 1996 and Clinton in 2005. Florida was given the house in 1987 and it opened as a museum in 1991

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official Website ↗

MOVING TO MONROE COUNTY?Fourteen services. One business each.

Attorneys, movers, insurance, title companies, roofers and nine more — one listed business per service in Monroe County.

See local help in Monroe County →

Keep comparing

Return to the Things to Do choices in Monroe County.

Back to Monroe County