More Than a Presidential Fishing Camp Story or: The Fine Simplicity of a Shenandoah Hike

Rapidan Camp via Mill Prong Trail

Shenandoah National Park

4.1 miles round-trip, moderate

Beneath cloud-scuttled blue skies on a late-August afternoon, between mileposts 52 and 53 on Skyline Drive, we lace boots and secure packs. Butterflies flicker about purple thistle and weedy wildflowers lining the Milam Gap Parking area: an unanticipated slice of asphalt sublimity along a storied scenic highway. Our destination is Rapidan Camp, remnants of the 164-acre refuge built by Avid Outdoorsman and United States President Herbert Hoover and First Lady Lou Henry Hoover. The camp served as therapeutic retreat during Hoover’s 1929-to-1933 term of office; today’s hike promises to be a pleasing amalgam of the scenic and the historically significant, a walk through sylvan loveliness to an architectural landmark in the heart of Shenandoah.

Posing with an AT Post.

We cross Skyline Drive and follow the white-blazed Appalachian Trail for the length of a football field to its intersection with the Mill Prong Trail.  As stipulated by one of the park’s ubiquitous metal-banded concrete posts, we take a downhill left on the blue-blazed path and descend into a green-green wooded valley. The trail, like most in our Shenandoah experience, is rock-strewn and requires ambulatory attention. Earlier in the day, one of us tripped and took a nasty tumble on a trek to Lewis Falls, requiring trailside first aid and resulting in an array of cuts and bruises, including a conspicuous facial contusion that is becoming angrier and more colorful by the minute. Not good... but it could have been worse.

Crossing the Mill Prong.

Our downward route through fern-lined forest is interspersed with stream crossings: a half-mile along, we traverse the Mill Prong for the first time, and in less-than-a-half-mile, we stone-step across a feeder creek. After intersecting with a horse path, the now yellow-blazed trail brings us to a final crossing of the Mill Prong and a stop at Big Rock Falls, a modest cascade spilling over nominally big rock into a picturesque pool. 

Wayside Beauty: Big Rock Falls.

We continue down-down-down the trail for another few tenths of a mile, cross a rutted access road, and make quick left on a footpath to our destination. Rapidan Camp, aka Camp Hoover: Marines worked hard to make this remote setting suitably presidential. They wired the camp for electricity and phone service, constructed a lodge, a town hall, mess halls, and cabins, including The Slums— colorfully named housing for the first lady’s secretarial staff. Of thirteen original buildings built where the Mill Prong merges with the Laurel Prong to form the Rapidan River, three remain: Creel House, Brown House, and the Prime Minister's Cabin.

Stonework Ruins: Rapidan Camp Fireplace.

Back in the day, two of Hoover’s trusty aides occupied Creel House: an FBI agent turned security-minded secretary and the president’s personal physician. On this day, Creel House is inhabited by a husband-wife docent team. The snack-munching husband appears on the porch, announcing that it is technically a day off but amicably volunteering his wife’s tour services around the camp.
Politely averting her eyes from the aforementioned conspicuous facial contusion—the one that’s becoming angrier and more colorful by the minute—our guide-wife explains that Hoover presented three criteria for his retreat location: reasonable proximity to Washington, D.C, an elevation that would deter mosquitoes, and opportunity for excellent trout fishing. If Hoover had added soothing water features and sheltering foliage to his wish list, this still would have been the spot. 

Not the White House: Brown House at Rapidan Camp.
(NPS Photo)

We pass through camp to Brown House, the Hoover's charming cabin, a rustic single-floor frame structure standing in stylistic distinction and color contrast to the chief executive’s official Washington residence. We linger on decking where the President and First Lady once entertained foreign dignitaries and domestic leaders, dear family and distinguished friends—working and strategizing, relaxing and recreating. Today, our guide directs attention to a recumbent nonvenomous snake (hiding) and a resident bat (hanging) before we move indoors.

Vintage Hosts and Guests: Brown House Interior.
(NPS Photo)

No photography or packs allowed inside Brown House, but we are invited to compare vintage black-and-white photographs with current furnishing and appointment.  It is a remarkable restoration, for sure: absent from the tableau, though, are the Hoovers, their guests, and the Filipino mess crew transferred to Rapidan Camp from the decommissioned presidential yacht.

President and First Lady on a Footbridge.
(NPS Photo)

The directed tour concludes on the doorstep of Rapidan Camp's third extant building, the Prime Minister's Cabin. After de-activating a remarkably complex security system, our guide invites us to visit the incorporated mini-museum and then takes her leave. We survey nicely-done exhibits before exploring the rest of camp, finding points of interest and interpretive signage along Rapidan's well-worn pathways.

Visitor on a Footbridge.

Retracing our steps to the trailhead, we reflect upon the hike’s blend of scenery and history. After his beleaguered term of office, we learned, Hoover and his wife bequeathed the privately-funded camp and acreage to the government; it would become part of newly-created Shenandoah National Park. Hoover had hoped that this much-loved place would be designated a permanent presidential retreat; Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s disability and distaste for all things Hoover, however, pointed him toward Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains and the more exotically named Shangri-La—rechristened Camp David by President Eisenhower. 

Hoover once observed, All men are equal before fish, an apt and charming postscript to the democratic sensibilities of his arcadian retreat. Of course, history tells us that government minions heavily stocked the Rapidan River with trout in anticipation of presidential visits, improving the piscine prospects of the Angler-in-Chief to something more than egalitarian. But a fine, simple sentiment, nonetheless.

Fishing is much more than fish.  
It is the great occasion when we may return
to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.
--Herbert Hoover