President Joe Biden likens the 132- room White House to a “gilded cage.” Michelle Obama called it “a really nice prison.” Harry Truman saw it as “the great white jail.” While 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has its history and grandeur, most U.S. presidents have had private retreats for escaping the Washington pressure cooker and especially the city’s sultry summers. Virginia was the choice of four presidents: Herbert Hoover, Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Thomas Jefferson.
The Hoovers, Rapidan Camp
PHOTO COURTESY OF POPLAR FOREST
Thomas Jefferson designed Poplar Forest as a retreat from busy Monticello.
Herbert Hoover specified three requirements for his getaway spot: At least 2,500 feet in elevation for cooler weather; within 100 miles of Washington, to get back in an emergency and excellent fishing. He and wife Lou directed the Marines to build a 13-building complex called Rapidan Camp on 165 acres in today’s Shenandoah National Park. This was a place “where no bells ring or callers jar one’s thoughts,” he said. Hoover’s design put every building within earshot of a babbling stream to “reduce our egotism, soothe our troubles and shame our wickedness,” he wrote. An avid angler, he delighted in casting for trout amid the rocky terrain and hemlocks, pines, oaks, poplars, mountain laurels and trilliums.
Being there was calming, Hoover’s doctor, Dr. Joel Boone, wrote: “The president could recuperate from fatigue faster than anybody I have ever known . . . He had tremendous power of relaxation once he surrendered himself to taking periods to relax and rest mentally and physically.”
Not only did he surrender to the woodsy surroundings, he hosted dignitaries, including British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, with whom he negotiated the 1930 London Naval Treaty while sitting on a log. Local “dignitaries” showed up too. In 1931, an 11-year-old boy emerged from the woods with “a possum for the president’s birthday.” Today, three unpretentious cabins remain connected by paths and stone bridges. The chocolate-colored Brown House (so named jokingly to contrast with the White House), is a one-story, wood-frame, gable-roofed pine cabin restored to its 1929 appearance inside and out. It has some original furnishings, like Lou’s desk and wardrobe. Both Herbert and Lou were geologists, so they “decorated” with rocks, shells, crystals and fresh hemlock.
The Roosevelts, Pine Knot
Theodore Roosevelt grew up in mansions and owned one, Sagamore Hill, on New York’s Long Island, but to decompress, he and Edith chose a modest cottage named Pine Knot nestled in 90 acres of dense Albemarle County woods. From 1905 to 1908, it offered “rest and repairs,” Edith said. Today, the cottage is basically unchanged, a 1,187-square-foot pine and board-and-batten house with two chimneys and four fireplaces, all made of stone from nearby Schuyler.
Journalist Walden Fawcett wrote that it was “quite the most unpretentious habitation ever owned by a president of the United States.” Teddy concurred and wrote, “The Tsar and Tsarina would have found it somewhat confining, since it consisted of one rough-cut, stone-chimneyed, boarded box, with two smaller boxes upstairs.”
The most decorative surviving features are porcelain doorknobs. The only remaining Roosevelt furniture is a large farm table. The cottage had no electricity or indoor plumbing and Teddy’s job was to “empty the slops.” Virginia’s nature beckoned. Teddy, a swashbuckling outdoorsman who had killed bison in North Dakota’s badlands, hunted for Virginia game. In 1906, he wrote to his son Kermit, that after 13 hours in the woods, he got one turkey. The Roosevelts relaxed on the porch and tuned into “little forest folk,” the president’s term. Teddy identified 75 bird species by their call on one day and some credit him with the last U.S. sighting of passenger pigeons in 1908, birds almost extinct then. In one of three upstairs bedrooms, flying squirrels “held high carnival at night,” Teddy wrote to his son, Archie.
The Roosevelts traveled to the hamlet of North Garden in a private rail car added to the mail train and then took a carriage or horses. They liked going there without “help” to truly unwind and had few guests. Theodore wrote his son, Kermit, in 1905, “It is really a perfectly delightful little place; the nicest little place of the kind you can imagine.”
The Kennedys, Wexford
WEXFORD PHOTO BY THOMAS AND TALBOT REAL ESTATE
Camp David in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, created by Franklin Roosevelt, was available, but Jacqueline Kennedy wanted to “get out of the governmental atmosphere,” ride horses and let daughter Caroline trot around on her pony, Leprechaun. John and Jackie chose 39 acres of rolling Loudoun County farmland and in 1962 and 1963, built a 3,500-squarefoot home near Marshall. They named it Wexford after the Ireland county of the Kennedy family’s origins. Jackie designed a one-level stoneand- stucco ranch-style house with seven bedrooms and five bathrooms.
They wanted “nothing elaborate,” said Pamela Turnure, the first lady’s press secretary. Jackie dubbed it “tweedy elegance” and wrote, “This house may not be perfectly proportioned — but it has everything — all the places we need to get away from each other – so husband can have meetings . . . wife paint . . . all things so much bigger houses don’t have. I think it’s brilliant!” Jackie, Caroline, 6, and son John, 3, traveled to Wexford by limousine and helicopter.
The president only visited twice in 1963 before his tragic assassination. They had a Signal Corps switchboard, a bomb shelter, stables and Secret Service workspace. The house was built for $127,000 in 1963 dollars. In 1964, Jackie sold the property for $225,000. Today it’s privately owned and worth millions.
Thomas Jefferson, Poplar Forest
President Thomas Jefferson probably originated the idea of a presidential getaway when in 1806 he built Poplar Forest, on a 4,800-acre plantation near Lynchburg, to evade public scrutiny and meddlesome guests. There, he wrote, “I fixed myself comfortably.” He had little love for the nation’s capital.
Having grown up near today’s Charlottesville, Jefferson complained to Treasury Secretary James Gallatin about Washington, “I consider it as a trying experiment for a person from the mountains to pass the two bilious months on the tide-water.” After the presidency, Jefferson wanted to avoid the hubbub of his home, Monticello, which had a steady stream of uninvited guests, plus his daughter, Martha, her husband and 11 children. He relished the peace of Poplar Forest and wrote in 1812, “Here I have leisure, as I have everywhere the disposition to think of my friends.”
Jefferson had studied buildings in Europe and drew especially on 16th-century, Italian architect Andrea Palladio and the concept of the Roman country villa. A self-taught architect, Jefferson built his 1,000-square-foot house into the crown of a hill and designed it to appear as one story from the front, but the dining room is actually two stories. Restored today and reflecting his love of geometry, Poplar Forest is the first octagonal residence in the United States. Natural light ripples from tall, triple-hung windows on each of the building’s eight sides and a 16-foot skylight over the center. It has four rooms, including a cube-shaped dining room. It is one of Jefferson’s “most consummate architectural works” and “one of the most extraordinary works of American architecture,” Travis C. McDonald, Jr., the home’s former director of Architectural Restoration, has said.
Whether it’s pines, 'possums or politicians, U.S. presidents have found respite in bucolic Virginia where they can clear their heads, gain perspective and restore balance to their lives.
Interested in visiting?
Rapidan Camp, in Shenandoah National Park, is managed by the National Park Service, www.nps.gov/shen. The grounds are open year round; the Brown House, from late spring to late October. Visit www. recreation.gov.
Pine Knot, www.pineknot.org, is owned by the Edith and Theodore Roosevelt Pine Knot Foundation and open by appointment.
Poplar Forest, www.poplarforest.org, is owned by the Corporation for Jefferson’s Poplar Forest and offers guided tours daily, March 15 through Dec. 30. It is open weekends from mid-January to mid-March.
Wexford is privately owned, and it is not open to the public.
