CANTON, Ohio >> If you’ve been intrigued by President Donald Trump’s praise of his long-ago White House predecessor William McKinley and yearn to know more, it’s time you head to Ohio.

America’s 25th president was born and is buried in the Buckeye State, where museums and monuments to him abound. Websites promoting the state’s McKinley attractions have seen a surge in page views since Trump began highlighting McKinley’s Gilded Age presidency, which ran from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. Officials hope a bump in summer tourism will follow.

“I don’t think there has been as much interest in William McKinley in at least a century, in terms of kind of the public consciousness,” said Kevin Kern, an associate professor of history at the University of Akron. The last time was in 1928, when McKinley’s face was printed on the $500 bill.

While Trump has attached himself to McKinley, Kern says the two Republicans’ political positions are, in many respects, “really apples and oranges.”

In McKinley’s day, the United States was just becoming the world’s foremost manufacturing power. Tariffs were viewed as a way to protect that momentum. Today, the economy is global.

Kern also noted that Republicans took huge losses in the 1890 election after the imposition of the McKinley Tariff, and that McKinley appeared to change his tune on tariffs in a speech delivered the day before he was assassinated in 1901.

Within an easy drive of Cleveland, you can find a host of sites for learning more about McKinley’s politics and personal life. Here’s a closer look:

McKinley was born in 1843 in Niles, a Youngstown suburb about 70 miles (112.65 kilometers) east of Cleveland. Here, you’ll find the National McKinley Birthplace Memorial, a classical Greek marble monument that sits on the site of McKinley’s former one-room schoolhouse. A McKinley statue stands at the center of the well-manicured Court of Honor, which is flanked by a small museum and the community’s library. The McKinley birthplace home and research center sits nearby.

Canton is perhaps best known for the Pro Football Hall of Fame, The city, about 60 miles (96.56 kilometers) from either Cleveland or Niles, is where the kindly and mild-mannered McKinley spent most of his adult life. A young McKinley settled here after serving in the Civil War, began his law career and married Ida Saxton McKinley.

The McKinley Presidential Library and Museum is a great place to dig into the shared policy goals — especially tariffs and territorial expansion — that attract Trump to McKinley.

An animatronic William and Ida McKinley greet visitors to the museum’s McKinley Gallery, which features interactive opportunities as well as historical furnishings, clothing, jewelry and campaign memorabilia. The building also houses a presidential archive and a science center complete with dinosaurs and a planetarium. The site’s dominant feature, however, is the imposing McKinley Monument, which looms on a hill atop 108 stone steps. It houses the mausoleum where the McKinleys and their two young daughters are buried.

More McKinley memorabilia is on display at the Canton Classic Car Museum.

The residents of Arcata, California, were not so enamored of McKinley’s imperialist legacy.

In 2018, amid national soul-searching over historical monuments, the liberal college town decided to remove an 8-foot sculpture of McKinley, the annexation treaty for Hawaii in his hand, from their town square. Over a century old, the statue had been moved to Arcata from San Francisco, where it was toppled in the 1906 earthquake.