Calvin Coolidge's 1927 Summer White House in the Black Hills
In the summer of 1927, the president of the United States moved to the Black Hills for three months and ran the country from a lodge in Custer State Park. Calvin Coolidge, a New Englander not given to grand gestures, chose western South Dakota for a long working vacation, and his stay left a lasting mark on the region. It brought a flood of national attention to a corner of the country that rarely received any, and it gave the men promoting Mount Rushmore a presidential endorsement at exactly the moment they needed one.
The choice of the Black Hills was not obvious. Presidents of that era typically summered closer to the capital or in familiar resorts. Coolidge’s doctors and advisers wanted somewhere cool and restful where the president, whose health and spirits had suffered after the death of his son a few years earlier, could fish, rest, and escape the Washington heat. South Dakota’s promoters, eager for the prestige a presidential visit would bring, worked hard to make the case for the Hills, pointing to the clear streams, the pine country, and the comfortable accommodations at the State Game Lodge in Custer State Park. The argument prevailed, and the lodge became, for that summer, the Summer White House.
A working summer
Coolidge did not merely vacation. The business of the presidency followed him west, carried over telegraph and telephone lines and by the staff and reporters who relocated to the region for the duration. He set up an office in a school building in nearby Rapid City, driving in to handle correspondence and meet with officials, so that for a season the small Black Hills city functioned as a satellite of the federal government. The arrangement was unusual enough to fascinate the national press, which sent correspondents to chronicle the president’s days, his fishing, the western outfits the locals pressed upon him, and the steady stream of business that reached him even in the hills.
It was during this stay, on a summer day, that Coolidge made the announcement that resonated longest. From Rapid City he issued a famously brief statement declining to seek another term: “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty eight.” Ten plain words, handed to reporters on slips of paper, that reshaped the politics of the coming election and remain the most quoted thing he ever said. That it happened in the Black Hills tied the region, permanently, to a small but memorable moment in American political history.
For the men carving Mount Rushmore, the president’s presence was an opportunity not to be wasted. The sculptor Gutzon Borglum and the project’s backers were still working to establish the carving as a serious national undertaking worthy of public confidence and, eventually, federal money. Coolidge was persuaded to ride up to the mountain and take part in a dedication ceremony, lending the enterprise the unmistakable weight of the presidency. Drilling on the granite began in earnest that year, and the federal support that would prove essential to finishing the work was helped along by the connection forged that summer. A president had stood at the mountain and blessed the idea, and that mattered.
The benefits to the wider region were considerable and lasting. The publicity drew attention to the Black Hills as a destination at a moment when the automobile was making such places reachable for ordinary American families, and the scenic highways that Peter Norbeck had championed were ready to carry them in. A region that had spent its first decades known mainly for gold and for the bitter history of how the Hills were taken now had a gentler story to tell, of clear trout streams and a president casting a line, and the promoters of Black Hills tourism made full use of it for years afterward.
Coolidge left in the early fall and never returned for so long a stay, and the State Game Lodge went back to being a comfortable retreat in a state park rather than the seat of government. But the summer of 1927 had done its work. It had put the Black Hills on the national map, attached the region to a piece of presidential lore, and given Mount Rushmore a crucial push at a formative moment. A reticent New England president, looking only for somewhere quiet to fish, ended up changing how the rest of the country saw western South Dakota.