A century ago, in the fall of 1924, a young military officer was abruptly summoned from his post in the Panama Canal Zone and ordered to report to Washington, D.C., for what his superiors felt was a more pressing duty: to help coach the football team at the Army’s Camp Meade in Maryland.
The officer found the assignment a strange one — a “cosmic top-secret wonder,” he later wrote somewhat dismissively — but reluctantly did his duty without question. The team was terrible and no amount of coaching could make the players ready to take on the far more impressive team that the Marine Corps fielded. The Marines won 20-0.
A major at the time, the officer felt his career was stalled — and it was. He wasn’t alone. In the years following World War I, the downsized post-war military was out of fashion in a peacetime America that was turning inward. Many of his fellow military officers left the service to seek more lucrative careers in the business world. This officer stayed but would have to be content for a while coaching football.
At some point that fall, the officer found time away from his coaching duties to travel to the Shenandoah Valley to visit his mother’s birthplace. She had moved away decades before, but there were still relatives around Mount Sidney in Augusta County who remembered her, and they greeted their new-found cousin with down-home enthusiasm. One neighbor baked four pies — and insisted he eat a slice from each of them.
It would be 36 years before that visitor came back again. When he did, he attracted far more attention than a neighbor with a sweet tooth and a passion for baking. Thousands were waiting to see him, politicians were on hand to accompany him, and the Secret Service kept an eye on all of them. That’s because by 1960 that unheralded visitor from 1924 who was stuck in a career rut was the president of the United States. His name was Dwight Eisenhower.
This year marks a series of anniversaries. It’s been 100 years since Eisenhower’s first visit to his mother’s birthplace. It’s been 80 years since he commanded the D-Day landings in Normandy. August 7 marks a less well-known milestone: the 80th anniversary of the date Eisenhower moved his headquarters from Britain to France, which showed in both symbolic and practical terms that the Allies were on the continent to stay. (It also shows how slow that Allied progress was; we often observe the anniversary of D-Day and forget how long those armies that landed on the French coast were mired down in the hedgerows and stiff German resistance.)
For that D-Day anniversary this year, we at Cardinal published the firsthand accounts the military collected from the Virginia-based units that went ashore that day, with some excerpts read by Virginia’s governor, two senators, and, in the case of Company A from Bedford County that suffered such horrific losses that the National D-Day Memorial is located in Bedford, seven high school students from the county. I also wrote a column about how Eisenhower’s mother grew up in Augusta County. That column has since led me to try to find her actual house. I have yet to find that, but I did learn about Eisenhower’s two visits to his mother’s birthplace.
His 1924 visit didn’t attract news attention, of course. Eisenhower’s 1960 visit, which came toward the end of his presidency, sure did. The official purpose of Eisenhower’s 1960 trip to the Shenandoah Valley was to give a policy speech in Staunton. The unofficial purpose was to aid Vice President Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign in a swing state. What interested me most about it, though, was the side trip that Eisenhower made to Mount Sidney.
A historical marker to Eisenhower’s mother?
In my original column, I made the case for why there should be a historical marker to Eisenhower’s mother in Augusta County. Nancy Sorrells of the Augusta County Historical Society says her group is now looking into one. She suggests it could go at Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church, the church Ida Stover belonged to. The church building she attended is gone, but the congregation remains in a newer structure. There is a historical marker at that church, noting its long history, and that marker makes note of Stover’s membership. A history of the church that Sorrells wrote contains this insight on the future president’s mother:
“In 1875, forty-seven pupils recited 18,663 Bible verses. One young scholar later recalled having to walk barefoot two miles to Sunday School while carrying her good shoes in her hand. That young woman was Ida Elizabeth Stover. … Young Stover was apparently a star Sunday School pupil. In 1875, she memorized 1,263 Bible verses. The next year she led all students with 1,313.”
In late October, Eisenhower set off on what he insisted was a “non-political” speaking tour, but just happened to hit many of the states in play that election year. (The biography “Eisenhower in War and Peace” by Jean Edward Smith is critical of Eisenhower’s military acumen as a general but lavishes praise on his political skills.) The Woodrow Wilson Birthplace Foundation had invited the 34th president to visit the birthplace of the 28th president; Eisenhower used that seemingly routine invitation as an opportunity to reflect on his foreign policy and indirectly make the case that voters should stay the course.
News accounts at the time show just how much things have changed since then — and how much they haven’t. He flew into the Weyers Cave Airport (today the Shenandoah Valley Regional Airport) in an aircraft the Staunton Daily News Leader described as a “big twin-engine military transport plane,” presumably because the runway was too short for the standard presidential plane. He was greeted by 4,000 people, a 21-gun salute and a phalanx of politicians whose motives differed. All were Democrats — conservative Democrats — because Republicans weren’t a significant force in the state at the time.
Gov. Lindsay Almond, who supported Democrat John Kennedy for president, was there purely in a ceremonial role to welcome the president to Virginia; then he returned to Richmond. Virginia’s two U.S. senators, Harry Byrd Sr. and Willis Robertson, accompanied Eisenhower on his trip, which was apparently intended to send a signal that they quietly favored Nixon — part of Byrd’s famous “golden silence” on presidential elections as the party moved left.
Eisenhower’s first order of business was to visit his mother’s birthplace, and he went there via a motorcade that must have been quite a sight on the narrow, winding country roads around Mount Sidney. I can testify that they are still narrow and winding today. I was never able to find the house but Nancy Sorrells of the Augusta County Historical Society tells me there’s a reason for this: The house isn’t visible from the road. She tells me the house “is in fine shape” but the owners don’t like curiosity-seekers, so I’ll avoid mentioning the specific road name. For Eisenhower’s visit in 1960, though, there were plenty of curiosity-seekers. “Pressed behind ropes around the plain white, two-story farmhouse were several hundred spectators,” the Richmond News Leader reported. “One group of children held aloft a cardboard sign which said: ‘Welcome Cousin Ike.’”
An historical marker to Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church in Augusta County mentions Dwight Eisenhower’s mother. Photo by Dwayne Yancey 
Ida Stover, Dwight Eisenhower’s mother, attended Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church in Augusta County. The building she attended is gone; this is the current structure. Photo by Dwayne Yancey
The president toured the house — “never seeming to be in a hurry,” according to the Staunton paper — and accepted a gift from Daniel Burner of Woodstock, who presented Eisenhower with a wooden chest that was believed to have belonged to a Pennsylvania branch of Eisenhower’s mother’s family but was left behind in Lewisburg, West Virginia, when they moved west. (The Stovers were originally in Pennsylvania; some moved to Virginia, others moved to Kansas. When Ida Stover turned 21 in 1883, she moved to join them.) Eisenhower was reported to be “very proud” of the chest.
He then went outside to plant a tree, dubbed a “Liberty Tree” after a project by the Jaycees to plant ceremonial trees around the world. Most of the news coverage of Eisenhower’s visit to the house deals with the tree planting. “Is that all the bigger the hole is going to be?” Eisenhower asked good-naturedly. A mound of dirt contained soil collected from the president’s birthplace in Dennison, Texas; his boyhood home in Abilene, Kansas; as well as other historic sites — the Alamo, Bunker Hill, Jamestown, Valley Forge and Yorktown. Eisenhower took a shovel and proceeded to fill in the dirt around the sapling. A photographer shouted: “Hey, Mr. President, you are planting that tree with your back to us.”
“Hold on, I’m doing a technical job here,” Eisenhower replied. “I’ve got to get some of this good Virginia soil on here to make it grow.” The Staunton paper said he then “did an about-face” to give the photographer a better view of the planting.
After that, Eisenhower took a quick spin around Augusta Military Academy, then was off to Staunton, where he toured the Wilson birthplace and spoke at what was then Mary Baldwin College (and today is Mary Baldwin University). Byrd introduced Eisenhower, praising him as someone who “preserved the peace without surrendering principle.” Eisenhower, in turn, praised Byrd’s “integrity, statesmanship and character.” In his formal remarks, Eisenhower drew parallels between Wilson’s foreign policy goals and his own: “If we heed Wilson we shall never hesitate to pay for freedom whatever price may be required. And in such determination there is the constant assurance of victory.” After a formal lunch with local dignitaries, Eisenhower boarded a helicopter for the flight back to Weyers Cave. The Staunton police chief estimated 25,000 came out to see the president at some point during his visit.
In political terms, Eisenhower’s visit was a success. Nixon carried Virginia that November, although did not win the election. All that’s history now. I was curious about something I was hoping would still be alive: the tree that Eisenhower planted. Alas, it’s dead — apparently killed by a reporter.
The Richmond News Leader reported: “In the excitement, as Eisenhower moved to view other seedlings that will be sent to his Gettysburg farm, a reporter trampled on the Liberty Tree and bent to replant it, provoking Byrd to a gale of laughter.”
What’s Walz mean for the Democratic ticket in Virginia?
OK, maybe that’s an excuse to run a pic of former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, but I’ll dig into some numbers related to Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz in this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. It goes out Fridays at 3 p.m. and you can sign up for that, or any of our other free political newsletters, right here:
