Millard Fillmore Is Born in a Cayuga County Log Cabin

Millard Fillmore was born on January 7, 1800, in a log cabin on a farm in what is now Moravia, in New York's Finger Lakes region. His parents were Phoebe Millard and Nathaniel Fillmore, tenant farmers scraping by on rocky, played-out soil, and Millard was the second of eight children and the oldest son. There was almost no school and almost no money; his father apprenticed him out to a clothmaker, a trade Fillmore hated. He taught himself by borrowing a share in a circulating library and reading every book he could get his hands on, then talked his way into reading law near Buffalo, got admitted to the bar in 1823, and built a career that carried him from the New York Assembly to Congress to the vice presidency. He became the 13th president in 1850, after Zachary Taylor died in office, the last Whig ever to hold the job.