Camp David
country retreat of the President of the United States
Camp David is a 125-acre (51-hectare) country retreat for the president of the United States. It lies in the wooded hills of Catoctin Mountain Park, in Frederick County, Maryland, near the towns of Thurmont and Emmitsburg, about 62 miles (100 kilometers) north-northwest of the national capital city, Washington, D.C. It is code-named Naval Support Facility Thurmont. Technically a military installation, it is staffed primarily by the Seabees, the Civil Engineer Corps (CEC), the United States Navy, and the United States Marine Corps. Naval construction battalions are tasked with Camp David construction and send detachments as needed.
Originally known as Hi-Catoctin, Camp David was built as a retreat for federal government agents and their families by the Works Progress Administration. Construction started in 1935 and was completed in 1938. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt converted it to a presidential retreat and renamed it "Shangri-La", after the fictional Himalayan paradise. Camp David received its present name in 1953 from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in honor of his father and his grandson, both named David.
The Catoctin Mountain Park does not indicate the location of Camp David on park maps due to privacy and security concerns, although it can be seen through the use of publicly accessible satellite images, and is also viewable on certain public web mapping services like Google Maps.
Presidential use
Camp David has been used to host private diplomatic meetings with foreign leaders and heads of state since at least World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt hosted Winston Churchill at Shangri-La in May 1943, during World War II. Dwight Eisenhower held his first post heart-attack cabinet meeting there on November 22, 1955, following hospitalization and convalescence he required after a heart attack suffered in Denver, Colorado, on September 24.
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This entry incorporates text from “Camp David” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.