Trout Run (retreat) Trout Run (retreat) Trout Run is a property in the Catoctin Mountains near Thurmont, Maryland, that was visited on several occasions by Presidents Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. Originally called Catoctin Lodge, it is located about away from the presidential retreat at Camp David and was established by one of Hoover's senior aides. It subsequently became the property of the family of a senior State Department official, who owned it for nearly 70 years, before it was acquired in 2013 by an arm of the Church of Scientology. It became the focus of controversy in 2015 when
Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower Western scholars has consistently held Eisenhower as one of the greatest U.S. Presidents. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Senator Robert A. Taft from Ohio were the two front-runners for the Republican Party presidential nomination going into the 1952 Republican presidential primaries. Also contending for the nomination were Governor Earl Warren of California, and former Governor Harold Stassen of Minnesota. Taft led the conservative wing of the party, centered in the Midwest, that rejected many of the New Deal social welfare programs created in the 1930s, and generally held a non-interventionist foreign policy stance, believing that America should avoid alliances with foreign