Millard Fillmore

• Millard Fillmore (January 7, 1800 – March 8, 1874) was

the 13th President of the United States, serving from 1850 until 1853,
and the last member of the Whig Party to hold that office.
• He was the second Vice President to assume the presidency upon the
death of a sitting president, succeeding Zachary Taylor, who died of
what is thought to be acute gastroenteritis.
• Fillmore was never elected president; after serving out Taylor's term,
he failed to gain the nomination of the Whigs for president in the 1852
presidential election, and, four years later, in the 1856 presidential
election, he again failed to win election as the Know Nothing Party and
Whig candidate
• Fillmore was born in a log cabin in Moravia, Cayuga County, in
the Finger Lakes region of New York State on January 7, 1800,
to Nathaniel Fillmore and Phoebe Millard, as the second of nine
children and the eldest son.
• (As this was three weeks after George Washington's death, Fillmore
was the first U.S. President born after the death of a former president.)
• He was the first American president to be born in the 1800s.
• He later lived in East Aurora, New York in the southtowns region, south
of Buffalo.
• Though a Unitarian in later life,Fillmore was descended
from Scottish Presbyterians on his father's side and English dissenters
on his mother's.
• His father apprenticed him to a cloth maker in Sparta, New York, at age
fourteen to learn the cloth-making trade.
• He left after four months, but subsequently took another
apprenticeship in the same trade at New Hope, New York.
• He struggled to obtain an education under frontier conditions,
attending New Hope Academy for six months in 1819.
• Later that year, he began to clerk for Judge Walter Wood of Montville,
New York, under whom Fillmore began to study law.
• Millard Fillmore helped build this house in East Aurora, New York, and
lived here 1826-1830.
• He fell in love with Abigail Powers, whom he met while at New Hope
Academy and later married on February 5, 1826.
• The couple had two children, Millard Powers Fillmore and Mary Abigail
Fillmore.
• After leaving Wood and buying out his apprenticeship, Fillmore moved
to Buffalo, where he continued his studies in the law office of Asa Rice
and Joseph Clary.
• He was admitted to the bar in 1823 and began his law practice in East
Aurora where, in 1825, he built a house for his new bride.
• In 1834, he formed a law partnership, Fillmore and Hall (becoming
Fillmore, Hall and Haven in 1836), with close friend Nathan K. Hall (who
would later serve in his cabinet as Postmaster General).
• It would become one of western New York's most prestigious firms.
• In 1846, he founded the private University of Buffalo, which today is
the public State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY Buffalo), the
largest school in the New York state university system.
• His military service was limited; he served in the New York
militia during the Mexican War of 1846 and during the American Civil
War.