Mission

The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation, Inc., maintains the house and property of the Birthplace and works to foster Pearl's wish expressed in the book My Mother’s House that the place should become...

    ... a living "gateway to new thoughts and dreams and ways of life" wherein art, music and education are valued and promoted.

Pearl writes:

I hope it will live a new life, not for myself or for my family but for people. I would like it to belong to everyone who cares to go there. From that house there has come so much life that it ought never to die or fall into ruin. For my ancestors it provided shelter and home in a new land, a house where they lived their new lives with traditional dignity and ancient faith in the fine things of life, in beauty of art and music, in the value of education, in the necessity of integrity and goodness. For my mother it provided a home, living forever in her thought and memory, though she made dwelling places in a far country. For me it was a living heart in the country I knew was my own but which was strange to me until I returned to the house where I was born. For me that house was a gateway to America. May it live again, my mother's house, and may it prove for others, too, a gateway to new thoughts and dreams and ways of life! (Pearl S. Buck, My Mother's House, p. 30-31).

The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation engages in educational, business, tourist, and other enterprises as may be suitable and necessary to promote and finance these aims.