You can’t get more American than the presidency of the United States. The person who holds the office not only carries out the executive responsibilities of the federal government but also becomes the face of the country. Being identified with the USA doesn’t end when the president leaves office. There is no way of separating that person from the nation he once led.

Why, then, does one of our presidents have the distinction of spending the last decade of his life and taking his last breath in a home that rests in a foreign territory?

William Howard Taft did not enjoy his single term as the 27th President of the United States (1909-1913). He was pressured into it by his wife and his friend and mentor, Theodore Roosevelt. He always thought he was better suited to serve on the Supreme Court. He got his chance in 1921 when Warren G. Harding nominated him to be Chief Justice of the United States.

At the time of his nomination, Taft was living in Connecticut, where he served as a professor of law at Yale University. His new job necessitated a new residence as well. His choice was a stately brick home located at 2215 NW Wyoming Avenue, Washington, D.C.

Taft lived there for the next nine years as he served as the tenth Chief Justice of the United States. It was during this time that Taft lobbied for — and Congress approved — constructing a permanent home for the Supreme Court. It had been sharing space with Congress in the U.S. Capitol.

Taft would not live long enough to see the new Supreme Court building. In 1930, five years before the Court would move to its new location, Taft’s health was in serious decline. He resigned as Chief Justice on February 3, 1930. Just one month later, on March 8, Taft died at his home.

You may be asking yourself, “This is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with answering the question, ‘Which president lived and died in a house that is in foreign territory?’”

Although Taft’s story ended in 1930, the house where he lived and died still had a contribution to make. In 1945, it was designated as the official embassy for Syria. The terms of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations of 1963 outline the basic rules and principles for consular relations between countries, essentially causing embassies to be treated as territories of that particular nation.

Syria’s diplomats were expelled from the United States in 2012, and what goes on at the residence at the moment is anyone’s guess. Although its diplomatic functions have been suspended, it remains, for the moment, the only piece of foreign territory where a U.S. president lived and died.

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