Why at least five of the last six US presidents have come to one Western Maryland airport (2024)

Two days before he was to deliver the State of the Union address in Washington D.C., during an election year — a year in which he said “our very democracy” is “at risk” — an American president made an unplanned stop outside a rather unexpected locale: Hagerstown, Maryland.

The airport for the city of less than 50,000 people, located about 20 miles north of the site of the Civil War’s bloodiest battle at Antietam, has been visited more times this year by President Joe Biden than the one for Baltimore, the state’s largest city that he toured by air in April. He’s been to the Hagerstown Regional Airport, according to his official schedule, twice this year, in both January and March.

The impromptu stop in March prior to his annual address to the nation, as recorded on a March 5 pool report by the press, represents a third 2024 visit to the Western Maryland locale, which he came to more publicly in late 2022 for a speech about the nation’s economy at the Volvo factory.

The trips to the regional airport for Hagerstown, a city founded in 1762 before the birth of the Republic, are less unexpected to a student of history: At least five of the last six presidents have landed at the airport located just south of the Pennsylvania border, near the Mason-Dixon line.

The reason why is simple, explains Carolyn Motz, a former airport director, who started as security and operations manager in the late 1980s: “We’re the closest airport to Camp David.”

More: Biden makes pitstop in Hagerstown on way to Camp David

President Nixon flew into Hagerstown in 1972, according to his schedule

John Seburn, president of the Hagerstown Aviation Museum, whose mission is to preserve Hagerstown’s aviation history that goes back over a century, has seen “quite a few” of those presidential visits to Hagerstown over the years, and confirms Motz’ assessment of the flights.

“The museum overlooks the back of the terminal where Air Force One taxis in,” he said. “Camp David is just on the mountain east of the airport.”

The president’s country residence, used since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a retreat as well as a location to host foreign leaders (and named after Dwight Eisenhower’s grandson), is in the woods of Catoctin Mountain Park in Frederick County, the next Maryland jurisdiction over from the Hagerstown airport.

Cynthia Shank, a Hagerstown resident of more than 30 years, said she’s never had any inconvenience from the heads of state headed to her hometown, even when she’s gone in the direction of the camp, which is a largely secluded site about 20 miles from Hagerstown.

“I travel over to Thurmont (a town near the Camp David site) regularly, and the Frederick paper will publish: This road is going to be closed,” said Shank, in an interview, “and you know the president’s coming to Camp David. You just rearrange your schedule a little bit.”

More: Where is Camp David? As Biden returns, a peek at the storied presidential location

Asked about the earliest president to fly into the Hagerstown airport, Motz said she recalls hearing about President Richard Nixon flying to the site. A document at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, which includes a “daily diary” or schedule, shows Nixon flew from the Wilkes-Barre-Scranton, Pennsylvania Airport into Hagerstown, Maryland on Sept. 9, 1972, just a few months after the Watergate burglary that ultimately brought down his presidency.

Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton also used the airport

The first commander-in-chief that Motz recalls seeing herself is President George H.W. Bush, a former pilot himself who flew 58 combat missions during World War II before leading the nation as head of state from 1989 to 1993.

“The first airplane that I ever parked had Barbara Bush on it,” said Motz, referring to the then-first lady. Sitting for an interview on May 30 in a lounge for pilots near the airport at the Rider Jet Center, Motz recalls the staff that took care of the landing for the nation’s leader and his wife.

“We had enough staff to operate the airport smoothly,” she said, “There was no fluff.”

The lack of fluff was not just with the staff; it was with the site. During President Bill Clinton’s first 100 days in office, he took a C-20 plane out of Hagerstown, according to the transcript of a press briefing with Dee Dee Myers, press secretary during the first two years of Clinton’s term.

The C-20 that flew Clinton from Hagerstown early on in his presidency was only about 83 feet in length, according to United States Air Force records. By comparison, the Boeing 747-200B currently in use for the president is almost three times that length, at about 231 feet.

The C-32 is a more “common” aircraft at Hagerstown Regional Airport, said Neil Doran, airport director, in an email. The C-32, a specially configured version of the Boeing 757-200 used primary by the vice president and by the first lady, is about twice the C-20’s length, at 155 feet.

During the interview at the airport site, Motz gave a possible explanation for the smaller plane used in Hagerstown during Clinton’s first term. The runway at the Hagerstown airport was not extended to 7,000 feet until the early 2000s, she said. (Clinton finished his second term in 2001.)

More: War, speeches, golf and a car wreck: Presidential presences in Washington County

President George W. Bush came to the airport days after 9/11, Motz says

Motz’ most memorable moment with a president or first lady came not in her first foray into parking, but with the son of Barbara Bush, the first lady who was on that first plane that she had parked about a decade prior.

President George W. Bush,like his parents before him, came to the Hagerstown airport while residing in the White House. Bush, the commander-in-chief during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, came to town just days after the Twin Towers came down, Motz said.

“Most of us were pretty sure after 9/11 that they might not possibly ever use a smaller airport or (a) nonmilitary airport,” Motz recalled. “To my great surprise, (President George W. Bush) came in the Friday after 9/11.”

She described an emotional scene with the president at the Hagerstown airport, a mere three days after the attack.

“Lot of tears that day, including some of us on the staff,” she said.

More: Hagerstown remembers 9/11

First Ladies Bush, Clinton and Obama all have visited the airport

In interviews, both Motz and Phil Ridenour, who took over as airport director upon Motz’s retirement in 2011, recall both presidents and first ladies flying into the airport site, which is scheduled to accommodate a total of about 300 inbound and outbound flights this year.

In addition to Barbara Bush, Motz recalls First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in Hagerstown from her tenure as director, while Ridenour recalls First Lady Michelle Obama arriving during his time.

Neither recalled President Barack Obama at the airport, but the site did come into play during the Obama presidency in a different way. On a Fourth of July weekend during his first term, then-President Obama was spending time with his family at Camp David when a two-seat plane flew from Salisbury, Maryland on the state’s Eastern Shore into the restricted airspace near the site.

“Authorities tried to contact the plane via radio, but there was no response,” according to an Associated Press article written at the time in 2011.

An F-15 fighter met the plane about six miles from Camp David and escorted it to a landing in Hagerstown, according to the reporting. The article quotes a Secret Service spokesperson who said the two-seat plane’s pilot was interviewed and authorities determined it was an accident.

(A similar encroachment and escort occurred four years earlier during the administration of President George W. Bush when four antique planes headed to a benefit for the Hagerstown Aviation Museum were flown out of the Camp David airspace by F-16s, according to a 2007 article from Baltimore Sun reporters.)

More: Hagerstown Aviation Museum has its own home

Biden came to Hagerstown before State of the Union address this year

When the president and the plane do arrive in town, the visit is often ephemeral.

“It’s more of a passing through,” says Seburn, the museum president, who in addition to his front-row seat has a longer view of the city’s aviation history, including the days of the Fairchild plant that produced planes for decades.

A photographer for the Herald-Mail snapped a photo of a brief Biden stop in in Hagerstown last year — with the current Oval Office occupant climbing aboard the presidential helicopter, Marine One. That same photographer captured then-President Donald Trump waving from the top of the stairs before boarding the presidential plane, Air Force One, in Hagerstown during the previous president’s first year in office in 2017.

The biggest wave (and the most enduring) can come sometimes not from the motion of a president’s hand or from the whirring of the blades during the switch from helicopter to plane, but from the news made while speaking on the airport grounds, preserved for history along with the images taken (with a Hagerstown photo caption) and reproduced in news media around the world.

This March, on an overcast and foggy day after a “bad weather” call cancelled his helicopter and brought him to Hagerstown after a weekend at Camp David, President Biden answered a few questions from reporters at the airport before boarding his plane to head back to Washington.

“We must get more aid into Gaza,” Biden told reporters, as he spoke in Hagerstown on the issues of the day, including the possibility of a ceasefire in Gaza, the 2024 presidential election, and the upcoming State of the Union address scheduled for that week. The quick exchange on the airport grounds was recorded in an official White House transcript with the dateline “Hagerstown, Maryland.”

While he spoke, Biden held a paper copy of The New York Times and a smartphone, according to an image captured that day by a photographer with the Paris-headquartered news organization, Agence France-Presse.

More: Call for Middle East 'ceasefire' comes to Maryland state capital through joint resolution

‘Not many communities get that privilege,’ former director Motz says

Longtime Hagerstown resident Cynthia Shank has only found out about such internationally known visits afterwards, to her disappointment.

“I understand, though, why they don’t publicize,” she says, “it because it’s the safety reasons.”

Motz credited the local police departments and the fire and rescue teams, who support such visits. “They have always been very low key and very professional about it,” she said.

Motz’s eventual successor as director of the airport, Ridenour, was on one of those fire teams with the Maugansville Goodwill Volunteer Fire Company when Barbara Bush visited Hagerstown. (Years later, he still has the photograph.) Ridenour called such visits a “prestigious thing.”

“There’s a lot of airports out there in the world that have never had the opportunity,” he says.

The airport’s current director, Neil Doran, called the visits a "source of pride” for the team.

Shank, the Hagerstown resident who desires to see the president, used the same phrase.

“It’s a source of pride,” she said, “(The presidents) know New York City and LAX and Chicago, and all those big airports, but they know our little Hagerstown airport is here.”

“It’s nice having the airport here,” Shank said, “I just wish we had more flights.” (Two days after the interview, the Washington County government announced a 38% increase this year in flights, including to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, St. Pete-Clearwater and Orlando-Sanford, Florida. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore toured the airport and the aviation museum last month.)

Motz, now the director of business development for the Rider Jet Center, summed up the presidential visits this way.

“We get some special visitors here,” she said, “not many communities get that privilege.”

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Dwight A. Weingarten is an investigative reporter, covering the Maryland State House and state issues. He can be reached atdweingarten@gannett.comor on Twitter at @DwightWeingart2.