East Texas Tales: Eisenhower Once Thought To Be From Rose City

East Texas Tales: Eisenhower Once Thought To Be From Rose City

By KENNETH DEAN
Staff Writer

President Barack Obama was not the first president to have his birthplace questioned ? instead it was Ike, who once was believed to have been born here in Tyler.

Local historian Mary Jane McNamara said she remembered the flack over Dwight D. Eisenhower's birthplace and how some in Tyler did not ever believe Ike could have been born anywhere else.

?We had a sign up saying that Tyler was the unrepudiated birth place of Ike, but the city had to take it down when it was learned he was actually born in Denison,? she said.

Ms. McNamara, using records at the Smith County Historical Society, showed that Eisenhower's parents lived in a home at 422 E. Oscar St. in 1891. The street was later renamed Rosedale Street.

She said Eisenhower told U.S. Army personnel at West Point that he was born in Tyler, and later told Ellis Island officials he was born in Tyler when returning into the country from abroad.

?Back then, a lot of children were born at home, so they didn't have any record of their birth such as a birth certificate. Ike's birth place wasn't brought into question until he was running for office,? she said.

A Tyler Courier-Times?Telegraph article stated in 1999 that people still believed Eisenhower was born in Tyler.

In the article, William Connally, of Tyler, now deceased, said he met the president in 1946 when the then-general was inspecting the Ramey Air Base.

Connally said during breakfast, he was asked where he was from, and he said Tyler.

?General Eisenhower's eyes lit up, and he said, ?That's where I was born,'? Connally told the newspaper then.

Connally said the general was asked about a 1945 report that Denison was his birthplace.

?He said that some reporter had asked his aging mother, and that was what she told him, but he thought she was confused,? Connally said. ?He said his father and brothers ?all told me I was born in Tyler.'?

Newspaper accounts in 1952 state an attorney for Eisenhower got a birth certificate for the presidential candidate in Denison, thus further stirring up arguments about his place of birth, Ms. McNamara said.

?There was a lot of pride in the fact that Eisenhower was from Tyler, and then we had to remove the sign. There were people that believed he was born here,? she said.

However, Ms. McNamara said the documents show that Eisenhower's parents moved from Abilene, Kan., to Denison in 1890 because of a failed crop.

His father ?went to work for the railroad and eventually he and his family moved to Tyler and bought the home on Rosedale Street. They didn't live here long before they went back to Kansas,? she said.

Eventually the ruckus about Eisenhower's birth place all but came to a standstill, but there always was someone claiming Tyler as the beloved president's hometown.

?He was born in Texas, and everybody liked Ike, so that's why some in Tyler wanted us to be the place,? she said.

Updated Monday, January 9, 2012 at 10:16 a.m. CST

Source: http://www.tylerpaper.com/article/20120109/NEWS08/120109820/-1/RSS01

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