Plymouth Notch, Vt. ? This is where an American president piled wood at 4 a.m., where he took the presidential oath of office at 2:47 a.m., and where he rests for eternity. Calvin Coolidge may have ascended to national office from Massachusetts, but his deep roots and his far horizons were here, in a tiny Vermont crossroads where the only industry is the family cheese factory up the hill from the Coolidge homestead.

Hardly anyone ever came from Plymouth Notch and, despite the handsome farmlands and woodsy mountains that frame the Coolidge site, hardly anyone ever comes here, either. But everybody comes from someplace, and people who come from places like this sometimes wander far – and yet the place never leaves them.

It is perhaps true that no American president was so marked by his home as the 30th president, and perhaps it loomed so large in his life because it was so small. But the place – Coolidge once spoke of “the loving breast of our eternal hills” – fairly screams the values of taciturn rural New England: economy, community, service.

“Coolidge thought Plymouth Notch was an idyllic place to raise a boy,” says Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas, a Republican from Middlebury. “There is a real lack of superficiality here. Here he found the values he carried to the presidency. He was never so passionate about anything as he was about Vermont.”

But with the 2008 presidential field including a Mormon reared in Michigan, educated in Utah and elected to the governor’s office in Massachusetts; a Navy brat born in the Panama Canal Zone, imprisoned in Hanoi and elected to the Senate from Arizona; a one-time first lady born in Illinois, educated in Massachusetts and Connecticut, drawn into political life in Arkansas and elected to the Senate from New York; and a Harvard-educated lawyer born in Hawaii, reared for a time in Indonesia and sent to Washington from Illinois, we might well wonder about the importance of a sense of place in modern American civic life.

It is hard to deny that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe were marked by Virginia, just as John Adams and John Quincy Adams were molded by Massachusetts. The Ohio presidents, especially William McKinley, William Howard Taft and Warren Harding, were shaped by their Midwestern homes, just as Lyndon Johnson was deeply etched by Texas and Jimmy Carter by Georgia. Harry Truman’s show-me persona sprouted fresh from the soil of Missouri, and can it be a coincidence that his hometown bore the name Independence?

But presidents and places sometimes make for unlikely matches. A few miles east of here is the New Hampshire home of Franklin Pierce. But was the 14th president, regarded as a Northern politician with Southern sensibilities, really a man of the Granite State? Was Chester A. Arthur, also of Vermont, more nearly a New Yorker, where he served as collector of the Port of New York? Bill Clinton found great symbolism in his Hope, Ark., home, and he portrayed himself as the king of the Arkansans while wooing his wife, Hillary Clinton, but was his character really formed in the study carrels of Yale Law School, which also rendered Gerald R. Ford a little less of a Michigander?

Both Presidents Bush ran for the White House from Texas, but the father, also a product of Connecticut (his childhood in Greenwich, his college years in New Haven), might more properly be thought of as the first chief executive from Maine. The son was less marked by Yale and is more nearly a Texan. He bears no trace of Maine.

The three California presidents have complicated pedigrees of their own. Herbert Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa, about the size of Coolidge’s Plymouth Notch, but his formative experiences may have been at Stanford University and in the hungry cities of Europe after World War I. Ronald Reagan was born in Illinois and yet almost always seemed as if he were from California, especially the back lots of Hollywood. Richard Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, yet often seemed as if he were really from New York.

Nixon’s competitor in the 1960 election poses no such dilemma. John F. Kennedy may have come of age on a PT boat in the Pacific – like Nixon, he was a Navy lieutenant – but he was indelibly a Massachusetts resident and president.

Abraham Lincoln, perhaps our greatest president, suggests that national values may in some cases and some eras be just as important as hometown venues. Lincoln served his single House term from Illinois, ran for the Senate against Stephen A. Douglas from Illinois and ascended to the White House from Illinois. But was his character really formed in the Kentucky of his birth, or in the Indiana of his youth, or in his travels on a flatboat across state boundaries down the Mississippi?

Maybe the answer is that the man who saved the country by preserving the Union was the only American president who can be claimed by us all.