When he was younger, Abraham Lincoln would read anything he could get his hands on. Occasionally, he would walk for miles to borrow a book he hadn't yet read. Here he is in his 30s when he was a member of the House of Representatives.
Rutherford B. Hayes and his wife on their wedding day, December 30, 1852.
Later, he was nominated to run for Congress while he was still in the Army during the Civil War. He accepted, but would not campaign, saying: "An officer fit for duty who at this crisis would abandon his post to electioneer... ought to be scalped."
Source: The White House
James A. Garfield, circa 1847. His father died when he was two years old, and so he earned money for school by driving canal boat teams.
Source: The White House
Chester Arthur, then a young lawyer, before his marriage to Ellen Herndon in 1859.
A few years earlier, he successfully represented a black woman, Elizabeth Jennings Graham, who was denied a seat on a streetcar in New York City due to her race. This helped lead to the desegregation of all New York transit systems in 1865.
Source: History.com
Benjamin Harrison, probably photographed during his college years, circa 1850.
His grandfather, William Henry Harrison, was elected president (although he died from pneumonia 31 days into office) and his great-grandfather, Benjamin Harrison V, was one of the Founding Fathers.
An early and undated photograph of Grover Cleveland. He's the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms.
William McKinley, aged 15, circa 1858. He enlisted in the Union Army as a private after the Civil War began, and ended with the rank of brevet major.
William Howard Taft's class photo from Yale College, 1878.
Not only did Taft become president, but he was also later the Chief Justice, which makes him the only person to hold the highest seat in both the executive and judicial branches of US government.
Source: History.com
Theodore Roosevelt ranching and hunting in the Dakota Territory in 1885.
When he was younger, TR had a weak heart and was advised by a doctor from going up the stairs too quickly. "Doctor," he replied, "I'm going to do all the things you tell me not to do. If I've got to live the sort of life you have described, I don't care how short it is."
Source: "Real Life at the White House: Two Hundred Years of Daily Life at America's Most Famous Residence."
Woodrow Wilson, circa 1875. Wilson's diplomatic actions during and after WWI have left their mark on virtually all US foreign policy from the end of that war to today.
Then-Senator of Ohio Warren G. Harding at age 33 in 1889.
He opposed the League of Nations and supported high tariffs, but otherwise didn't take many strong stands on issues while in the Senate.
Source: History.com
Calvin Coolidge, then-Governor of Massachusetts, milks a cow at his father's home in Vermont, July 14, 1920.
Herbert Hoover at the age of seventeen when he was attending Stanford University.
He entered the university in 1891, the year the school officially opened, and he attended with free tuition, according to AP.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt with his dog, "Budgy," on a donkey in 1884. Three years later, his father took him to meet then-president Grover Cleveland, who told FDR: "My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be president of the United States."
Three years later, his father took him to meet then-president Grover Cleveland, who told FDR: "My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be president of the United States."
Source: PBS
Postcard photo of Harry S. Truman taken in France during World War I. On the other side of the postcard it said, "Given to John A. Hatfield in France in 1918 - returned to Harry S. Truman in January, 1962."
U.S. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife-to-be Mamie Geneva Doud, 18, pose on a Sunday morning in November 1915, one month after their first meeting.
John F. Kennedy swimming in the backstroke event for the varsity swimming team at Harvard, where he was a student, 1938.
Lyndon B. Johnson at his family home in the Texas hill country near Stonewall, Texas, 1915.
After finishing a year of college, he taught at a primarily Mexican-American school in southern Texas. Recalling the experience after he signed the Higher Education Act of 1965, he said, "I shall never forget the faces of the boys and the girls in that little Welhausen Mexican School, and I remember even yet the pain of realizing and knowing then that college was closed to practically every one of those children because they were too poor."
Source: History.com, "Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966."
Richard Nixon played the violin in his high school orchestra.
He could also play saxophone, accordion, and piano. Later when president, he presented Duke Ellington with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House on the musician's birthday, and then both played and sang 'Happy Birthday' for him.
You can see a clip of Nixon playing "Happy Birthday" for Ellington here.
Gerald Ford on the University of Michigan football team, 1933. The team won two national championships and his teammates voted him MVP. A fellow football player remarked that his teammates "felt he was one guy who could stay and fight for a losing cause."
Source: The Michigan Alumnus, Volumes 79-80.