The story of the Wilson Ancestral Home
The cottage at Dergalt, in the foothills of the Sperrin Mountains a couple of miles south of Strabane, was the home of the Wilson family, Ulster-Scots farmers working a small hillside holding. In 1807 James Wilson, then twenty years old, left it to emigrate to America - one of the great wave of Ulster emigrants who crossed the Atlantic in search of land and opportunity in the early nineteenth century.
James settled in the United States, and the family rose over the following decades. Just over a century after he left this hillside, his grandson Thomas Woodrow Wilson became the 28th President of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921 and leading the country through the First World War. The plain Tyrone cottage his grandfather walked away from had produced, within three generations, one of the most powerful figures in the world.
What makes the house remarkable is how much of it survived. Rather than being cleared and reconstructed, the cottage kept the family's own furniture: the out-shot bed set into the kitchen wall by the fire, the curtained beds, everyday pieces, and a portrait of James Wilson over the hearth. It is a rare, intact picture of pre-Famine rural life in Ulster, the kind of home thousands of emigrants carried in their memory across the ocean.
Today the property is cared for by National Museums NI and administered from the nearby Ulster American Folk Park, the major open-air museum that tells the wider Ulster emigration story. The outdoor site and interpretation are open to all, while the cottage interior is opened on a limited, seasonal basis, keeping this quiet presidential homestead as honest and unshowy as the family who once lived there.