Camp David Development – Thurmont MD

Description

“One public service site that the public rarely sees because of its very private purpose is in the Catoctin Mountain Park recreational area, sixty miles north of Washington, D.C. This site was developed by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration and the CCC and was used first as a camp for crippled children, followed by a few other purposes, until FDR visited it in 1942 and claimed it, naming it his ‘Shangri-La.’ The cooler mountain climate provided the president and his family a chance to get some relief from the humidity and heat of the capital in those days before air-conditioning. It was also a place the Secret Service decided would be safer than FDR’s boat or even his Hyde Park home. This ‘safe place’ has been used as a retreat by every American president since. President Dwight Eisenhower renamed it Camp David after his grandson. Occasionally, important sessions are held at Camp David, informal yet serious meetings with dignitaries, such as when Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat met there with President Jimmy Carter to work out a historic peace accord between their nations in 1978.”