These days, whenever the president wants to unwind, a short helicopter ride to Camp David in the Maryland mountains provides him with some much-needed solitude.
Every chief executive since Franklin D. Roosevelt has stayed here. Joe Biden is particularly fond of the place. But not everyone likes it. Donald Trump said it was “interesting for about 30 minutes.” Bess Truman thought it was boring. To each their own.
But presidential holidays a century ago were pretty rough — literally.
This is the story of the short-lived Camp Hoover.
President Herbert Hoover is remembered for the worst misfortune of his presidential career: the onset of the Great Depression while he was in office. But he was hugely popular when he took office in 1929.
Hoover was the first president born and raised west of the Mississippi River and had spent years as an engineer living in mining camps, so the outdoors appealed to the most uptight of presidents.
Shortly after moving into the White House, Hoover found the perfect place for a getaway: an ideal hideaway at the headwaters of the Rapidan River on Virginia's Double Top Mountain. The nearby Mill Prong and Laurel Prong rivers offered great fishing. (Hoover was an avid angler, but he was also a coat-and-tie kind of guy.)
The people of Virginia offered the land for free, but Hoover wouldn't listen. He insisted on paying the going rate of $5 per acre for 164 acres of untouched land, plus $22,719 for materials personally. The Marines provided free labor, labeling the construction project a “military exercise.” They built 13 buildings, including a cabin, two mess halls, a lodge, a meeting house, and Hoover's residence, the Brown House (to distinguish it from the White House). There were hiking trails, a miniature golf course, and a trout pond, where the fish were said to be so docile that they “went slowly out and looked down at you.”
To save money, Hoover decommissioned the presidential yacht Mayflower and relocated its dining room crew and utensils to the camp, officially called Camp Rapidan, but known to everyone as Camp Hoover.
He was so simple-minded that he used to deliver mail by dropping it from an airplane!
That didn't stop some of the day's luminaries from visiting there, including Thomas Edison, Edsel Ford, Governor Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Winston Churchill, and then-British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. In a move that foreshadowed Camp David's later role as a site of delicate diplomatic negotiations, Hoover offered to forgive Britain's World War I debts in exchange for the U.S. purchasing Bermuda, Trinidad, and British Honduras. (MacDonald's response was, “Thanks, but no thanks.”)
In August 1929, Hoover's doctor encountered and spoke with the mountain boy while he was hiking in the nearby woods. The doctor was horrified to learn that because there were no schools nearby, neither the boy nor his eight brothers and sisters had ever attended school.
A few days later, the boy and a few friends rode on horseback to Hoover Field and presented the president with a live possum as a birthday present. (Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who was visiting with her husband, Charles, was amused to learn that the children had never heard of the world-famous aviator.) Hoover was so moved that he personally funded a small school for poor local children.
Camp Hoover's glory days were short-lived. After losing his reelection bid in 1932, Hoover handed the camp over to the government. Franklin Roosevelt visited the camp in 1933 but was not impressed: the trails were wheelchair accessible and the water was too cold for swimming.
The Boy Scouts used the site from 1946 until the early 1960s, by which time many of the cabins had fallen into decay.
Still, VIPs kept coming: Jimmy Carter was the first president since Roosevelt to visit, Vice President Walter Mondale got trapped in a snowstorm and the Secret Service needed a chainsaw to free him, and Vice President Al Gore also stopped off during his presidency.
The National Park Service restored the three remaining cabins, including the Brown House, and renamed them Rapidan Camp in 2004. Today, it can be visited by hiking or van ride from the nearby visitor's center.
Visitors will relive forgotten presidential history in the same setting that Herbert and Lou Hoover enjoyed nearly 100 years ago.
