Rapidan Camp: The President Who Fished His Way to a Policy

Herbert Hoover had been president for less than a year when he bought the land along the Rapidan River in Madison County, Virginia, in the summer of nineteen twenty-nine. He paid for it himself. His stated reason was simple: he needed a place to fish. The trout streams of the Blue Ridge were within a day's drive of Washington, and Hoover, who was not a man given to leisure, had decided that fly fishing was the one form of rest he could justify.

The camp he built was not rustic by most standards. There were eventually thirteen structures, including the President's cabin, a mess hall, a guest house for visiting dignitaries, and quarters for the Secret Service detail. Marines guarded the perimeter. Telephone lines were strung up the mountain. A road was cut to the camp specifically to allow automobile access from the Shenandoah Valley.

But the camp was also, in Hoover's conception, a working retreat. He received cabinet members and foreign leaders there. He worked on his response to the stock market crash that had come just months after he purchased the land. He convened a meeting with his education commission at Rapidan in the summer of nineteen thirty-one. The fishing, when it happened, was a break between briefings.

After he lost the election, Hoover donated the camp to the federal government, and it became part of Shenandoah National Park, formally established in nineteen thirty-five. By then Hoover had been voted out of office in one of the largest electoral repudiations in American history. The Depression that had arrived on his watch, and that he had responded to with a philosophy of voluntary action and market self-correction rather than direct federal relief, had ended his presidency. He left Washington in March of nineteen thirty-three after a tense shared car ride with Franklin Roosevelt to the inauguration.

Rapidan Camp still stands. The National Park Service has restored three of the original structures, including the Brown House, which served as Hoover's personal cabin. A hiking trail leads to it from Milam Gap, roughly four miles round trip through the forest the Civilian Conservation Corps planted in the decade after Hoover left. The creek still holds trout.