A president of the United States built the house at 24 Shearer Avenue in East Aurora with his own hands, and it is not on Shearer Avenue by choice. The 1826 clapboard cottage where Millard Fillmore started married life has been moved twice: once shoved backward on its own lot to make room for a movie house, once loaded up and hauled across the village by a toy company founder. The federal nomination that made it a National Historic Landmark describes the building as not architecturally distinguished. That is exactly right, and beside the point.
The house he built
It is a story-and-a-half wood frame house: gable roof, clapboard siding, a shed-roof porch on round columns, a brick chimney. The kind of house a young lawyer with no money puts up for himself. Fillmore did much of the work himself on a lot on Main Street, and the bronze marker the Daughters of the American Revolution set in 1931 says he helped build it in 1825 and brought his bride, Abigail Powers, to it in 1826. The Fillmores lived there until 1830, and their son was born in the house before the family left for Buffalo.
Four years is not a long tenancy. It is, however, the only house Millard Fillmore lived in that is still standing. The Aurora Historical Society, which owns it, calls it the only remaining house of the 13th president. His Buffalo mansion is gone.
The presidency, briefly
Fillmore was elected vice president in 1848 and became president on July 9, 1850, when Zachary Taylor died in office. He signed the Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act, a law requiring citizens and officials in free states to assist in returning escaped slaves. He left office in March 1853, the last Whig to hold the job, and his record has been argued over ever since.
Closer to home, he was a founder of the University at Buffalo and served as its first chancellor from 1846 to 1874, holding the post through his presidency and long after it. But the building in East Aurora predates all of that. It is the house of a 26-year-old attorney, not of a head of state, and that is most of what makes it worth the visit.
Moved once for a theater
By 1915 the Main Street lot was worth more than the cottage on it. The house was pushed back on the property to clear space for the Millard Fillmore Theatre: a president's home displaced by a building named after him, which is either irony or a very local sense of humor. A decade later the Aurora Theatre was built on that same site, opening in June 1925.
Moved again for an artist
Pushed to the back of a lot and left alone, the house fell apart. In 1930 Margaret Evans Price (a children's book illustrator, and that same year a co-founder of Fisher-Price Toys with her husband Irving Price, Herman Fisher and Helen Schelle) bought the wreck. She and Irving had the original core of the building moved to 24 Shearer Avenue, restored it, and she used it as her studio.
The Prices are the thread that runs through this whole village. Irving Price was one of the local businessmen who financed the Aurora Theatre in 1925, alongside Elbert Hubbard II of the Roycroft Campus. He helped build the theater that stands where a theater once displaced Fillmore's house, then paid to move the house he had helped displace. Five years after that he put his name on the toy company that would define East Aurora for the rest of the century.
What is there now
The house was named a National Historic Landmark in 1974. The Aurora Historical Society acquired it in 1975 and has worked since to bring the interior back toward its 1826 condition. Inside are the living room, kitchen, bedrooms, a playroom, a Victorian library and a carriage barn, furnished with pieces from the Fillmores' East Aurora, Buffalo and White House households, and period gardens outside. It is open seasonally and by reservation. Call ahead, at least a couple of days, and you get about an hour with a guide.
Roycroft, the theater and this house sit within a short walk of one another, which is a strange density of American history for a village this size. The rest of the region is laid out in the full town-by-town guide.
Wear it
The Millard Fillmore House tee is part of the ALL America City collection, one Western New York landmark per shirt. A small frame house that got moved twice, outlasted the theater it was moved for, and is still standing has earned a spot on a shirt.