Buck, Pearl, House

About this property

The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace is a historic home in Hillsboro, West Virginia where American writer Pearl S. Buck was born. The home now serves as a museum offering guided tours. The site also includes a carpentry shop and barn with over 100 historic farm and woodworking tools, and the log home of Buck's father's family, the Sydenstrickers, which was moved from Greenbrier County. Built around 1875, the three-story home was constructed by hand by a Dutch refugee family escaping religious persecution in the Netherlands. Buck was born at the house in 1892 while her parents, Caroline Stulting and Absalom Sydenstricker, were on leave from Presbyterian missionary work in China. They returned to China three months after her birth. Pearl S. Buck was the first American woman to win both the Pulitzer Prize (1932, for The Good Earth) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1938). A world-renowned author, she wrote over 100 books and hundreds of short stories and magazine articles. Her books have been translated into 69 foreign languages. If it (the house) ever lives again, and God grant it may for my Mother's memory, I hope it will live a new life, not for myself or for my family but for people. I would like it to belong to everyone who cares to go there. From that home has come so much life - that it ought never to die or fall into ruin. For my ancestors, it provided shelter and home in a new land, a house where they lived their new lives with traditional dignity... For my mother, it provided a home, living forever in her thought and memory, though she made dwelling places in a far country. For me it is a living heart in the country I knew was my own but which was strange to me until I returned to the house where I was born. For me that house was a gateway to America. May it live again, my Mother's house, and may it prove for others, too, a gateway to new thoughts and dreams and ways of life. The site was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 15, 1970. Pearl Buck gave her valuable manuscript collection to the Birthplace Foundation in 1970. The collection (minus The Good Earth, which was missing at the time) was acquired in 1974 and is presently stored at West Virginia Wesleyan College, under a special arrangement made with Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, then President of the college. The manuscripts will remain there until suitable housing is built at the Birthplace. They are available to researchers with permission from the foundation. The Stulting family, Pearl Buck's maternal ancestors, moved from Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 1847 with 300 of their friends and relatives so that they might practice their religion freely during a time of religious intolerance in the Netherlands. They were forced to leave the land they loved and move to a strange new country. The party consisted of Cornelius Stulting (called "Mynheer" in Pearl Buck's books), his wife Arnolda, and their five married sons and their families—three generations.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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