This unassuming white clapboard cottage on the Eisenhower campus is preserved exactly as the family kept it. David and Ida Eisenhower bought the house in 1898 and raised six boys here on a railway-mechanic's wage. The kitchen, the parlour with its family portraits, the modest upstairs bedrooms with iron bedsteads — all are as Ida left them when she died in 1946.
Free guided tours leave from the visitor centre every half hour or so. The house itself takes perhaps fifteen minutes to walk through, but the guides are excellent and tell stories you won't get from the museum panels — about Ida's pacifism (she opposed Ike's appointment to West Point on principle), about which brother slept where, about the chores and the family rules. The boys' "no fighting" rule, broken constantly, is part of the family legend.