Feb 21, 2022 5 min read

It was another day in mid-April, just a handful of days after Easter in 1928, when the bespectacled former haberdasher from Missouri arrived in Washington.

The straightforward, 44-year-old man with a Midwestern accent as flat as the Plains was unlikely to cause much of a stir anywhere he went, and certainly not in Washington around that time. The community was far too preoccupied with a visit by Clarence D. Chamberlin, a daredevil aviator who flew nonstop from New York to Europe just a few weeks after Charles Lindbergh the year before. Also grabbing attention was a 10-mile chase that had Washington’s police firing shots at the driver of a vehicle stolen in Wheeling, W.Va., but not apprehending him. In national news, bandits gunned down a police officer in Toledo, Ohio, and Norman Thomas was nominated to be the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, the first of six times Thomas ran for president under the Socialist banner.

The unremarkable man from Missouri came to Washington in his capacity as president of the National Old Trails Road Association. The business and community leaders who met with him in Washington and, later, Uniontown, had no way of knowing that, almost 17 years to the day later, he would become president of the United States.

Harry Truman is one of several presidents and former presidents who have passed through Washington and Uniontown over the decades, from George Washington to Barack Obama. They came as candidates and commanders in chief, and also just private citizens. Truman’s visit in 1928 was so unassuming that it it didn’t merit a mention in either Washington’s Observer or Reporter, then separate newspapers.

As president of the National Old Trails Road Association, Truman visited Washington and Uniontown to work out the details of placing the Madonna of the Trails monument along Route 40. It was one of many stops he made around the country, since 12 of the monuments were going to be placed along the road from Maryland to California by the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. At the time, Truman worked full time as a judge – the equivalent of a county commissioner – in Jackson County, Mo., which contains Kansas City and Truman’s hometown, Independence, Mo. He explained in his memoirs that, as president of the association, “I made a number of talks on the historical importance of roadways and channels of communication.”

After Truman stopped in Washington, he journeyed to Uniontown and then on to Cumberland, Md. A compulsive writer of letters, Truman penned a dispatch to his wife, Bess, and daughter, Margaret, about his trip on April 17, 1928. The letter is addressed “Dear Babies,” and offers the most detail about what Truman was up to in Washington and Uniontown.

He wrote that in Washington, “We met one of our vice presidents for Pennsylvania and had a meeting with him and the chamber of commerce and the president of the country club, McGinnis by name, and tried to settle the monument location for Pennsylvania.”

Then, according to Truman, they traveled to Uniontown, where they attended a Rotary Club meeting, “after which we met the president of the chamber of commerce and the manager of the Motor Club and found out that Washington and Uniontown are at swords’ points because the former got the monument.”

Truman added, “They’ve even brought in the governor and the state auto commissioner. They’re worse than Kentucky mountaineers.”

The dispute was eventually resolved, and the monument was dedicated in December 1928. Truman did not return to the community for the occasion, but he was the keynote speaker when the Madonna of the Trails monument was unveiled in Lexington, Mo., about 50 miles east of Kansas City, Mo., on Sept. 17, 1928. Cameras from Universal Newspaper Newsreels were on hand, and captured Truman receiving replica bookends of the monument. It’s believed to be the earliest film footage of Truman that exists.

He might have visited the monument in Washington County in 1953 when, after he left the White House, Truman and his wife embarked on a summertime car trip from Missouri to New York City and back. On that journey, Truman is known to have stopped in Wheeling, W.Va., and a state trooper pulled over the Trumans on the Pennsylvania Turnpike for driving in the lefthand lane and backing up traffic.

Sam Rushay, an archivist with the Harry Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Mo., said Truman’s wide-ranging travels were important once his political career grew beyond Missouri’s boundaries.

“It helped him gain knowledge of the country, and made him more aware of local issues,” Rushay said. “It helped him meet people and gain familiarity with parts of the country he otherwise might not know about.”