Pearl S. Buck Birthplace
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Pearl Buck House
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The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace
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| Location | 8129 Seneca Trail, Hillsboro, West Virginia |
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| Coordinates | 38°8′30″N 80°12′19″W / 38.14167°N 80.20528°WCoordinates: 38°8′30″N 80°12′19″W / 38.14167°N 80.20528°W |
| Area | 16.4 acres (6.6 ha) |
| Built | 1892 |
| NRHP Reference # | 70000663 |
| Added to NRHP | June 15, 1970 |
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.
Buck herself was heavily involved in the preservation and restoration of the house. In the book My Mother's House she shared her vision for the museum:
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.
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