Harry Truman–Solomon Young relationship

The relationship between Harry S. Truman and Solomon Young was one of the defining bonds of Truman’s early childhood. Young offered his grandson more than affection: he gave him a place at the center of a crowded family world, carried him into the routines and pleasures of farm life, and embodied a self-made past that Truman would remember as a source of confidence. The relationship ended in childhood with Young’s death, but the image of the formidable, loving grandfather remained vivid in Truman’s account of who he was and where he came from.

A Grandfather at the Center of the Household

Solomon Young was already in his seventies when the John Truman family returned to the Young farm in 1887. He was among the most respected men in the county, yet remained fit and active. John became his partner, bringing the family back to the homeplace after earlier attempts at making a living elsewhere. The farm became the setting for Harry’s first sustained observations of the world: from the age of three, he grew up under the same roof as his grandfather, his parents, his paternal grandfather Anderson Truman, and a shifting circle of relatives, hired workers, and visitors. The household usually numbered at least fourteen or fifteen people and spanned three generations.

Within that busy home, Young’s bond with Harry had a particular intimacy. Truman later remembered his grandfather taking him riding through the countryside in a high-wheeled cart behind a strawberry roan trotting horse. For a week one summer, the two made the six-mile trip to the Belton Fair each day, watching races from the judges’ stand and eating striped candy. Truman remembered it as the best time a child could have, and recalled Young as a great, large man with a flowing white beard and strong hands. The details make the affection concrete: it was expressed through repeated journeys, shared attention, and time deliberately spent together.

Farm Life and the Grandfather’s Authority

Young’s land gave their relationship a wide and varied setting. His immediate farm covered 600 acres, and a second farm a few miles away nearly 1,000 more. Harry remembered the animals, the work of harvesting wheat and threshing grain, the corn shucking, and the mowing and stacking of hay. His father gave him a black Shetland pony and a saddle, and let him ride beside him on rounds; the boy’s memories also place Young within a family life organized around the farm and its seasons. In retrospect, this abundance and self-contained security stood apart from the circumstances the Trumans would later know.

The child’s affection for Young was accompanied by an awareness of his standing. When Harry and his grandfather conspired to cut the curls from little Vivian’s hair on the south porch, Martha Ellen Truman was furious when she discovered the deed. Yet she said nothing, because Young’s authority in the household was so secure. The episode presents him not simply as a doting companion but as a patriarch whose decisions and presence shaped the family’s everyday order. Harry’s closeness to him did not make Young’s position less imposing; the boy’s access to the household’s most powerful figure was part of what made their bond distinctive.

Even Young’s illness became an occasion for their characteristic exchange. When Harry approached cautiously to ask how his grandfather was feeling, Young turned the concern back on the boy: “How are you feeling? You’re the one I’m worried about.” The remembered reply joins humor with care. It shows the old man addressing Harry as someone worth worrying over, while retaining the forceful presence that the family knew in him.

Loss and the End of the Homeplace

Solomon Young died in 1892, at seventy-seven. Harry was nine, and the account records no specific description of his feelings at the time. The loss was followed, less than a year later, by the destruction of the Young house in a fire accidentally started as a servant tried to light a coal-oil lamp. Practically nothing was saved. A small temporary house was built for Grandma Young, and Uncle Harrison returned to help, but the old way of life at the homeplace was over. Young’s brass telescope, a keepsake from his days on the plains that he had given to Matt before the fire, was the one personal possession of his to survive it.

The distinction between what the record says and what Truman later remembered matters: his immediate response to Young’s death is not described, but the grandfather became a frequent subject of his later recollections. Truman spoke of the big man in his background as someone who had made his own way through nerve and will, had seen the Great West while it was still wild, and had taken part in history before coming home to Missouri. The memory grew from the child’s intimate experience into a family inheritance of character and place.

A Lasting Measure of Personal Worth

Young’s importance to Truman lay partly in the simple certainty of being loved and singled out. The older man’s rides, fairground visits, and attention made the grandson feel that he mattered. In later life, Truman connected that feeling to the example of a grandfather who had made his way in the world; with such a figure behind him, he wrote, a boy could hardly imagine himself a nobody. That is not a claim that Young determined Truman’s later choices. It is evidence that Truman understood his grandfather’s affection and life story as part of the foundation of his own sense of possibility.

The relationship therefore survives in two forms in the narrative: as a series of small, remembered acts of companionship and as a retrospective portrait of a man whose stature enlarged the child’s sense of himself. The farm and the crowded household disappeared as a way of life, and Young died while Truman was still young. But the grandfather’s presence continued in the remembered image of the strong-handed, white-bearded patriarch who made room for a boy beside him—and left that boy with a durable belief that he was somebody particular.