Last Updated on September 14, 2026 6:17 pm
When First Lady Melania Trump visits Ashe County Tuesday, she'll become the fifth member of the White House to visit the High Country in recent decades.
The most recent prior visit came Nov. 1, 2020, when Vice President Mike Pence made a brief stop in Boone to attend a Sunday morning church service. Pence attended the 9 a.m. service at Alliance Bible Fellowship as a guest of Franklin Graham, president and CEO of Samaritan's Purse, which is based in Boone. Pence did not speak at the service but greeted reporters alongside Graham before the service began.
Before that, on Oct. 17, 2011, President Barack Obama made an unannounced stop in downtown Boone during a three-day bus tour promoting his American Jobs Act. Obama's bus arrived in Boone in the early afternoon, and the president stopped at Mast General Store, where he browsed candy and greeted residents, before continuing on to Wilkes County later that day. The visit came amid a broader push to sell his jobs bill to voters ahead of the 2012 election.
Further back, on July 30, 1998, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore traveled to Ashe County to designate the New River as one of 14 American Heritage Rivers under Clinton's American Heritage Rivers Initiative. The ceremony was held at the Boggs Community Farm, where Clinton thanked North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt for his support of the designation. The New River Watershed spans 21 counties across North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.
Melania Trump's visit Tuesday will mark the first White House visit to the High Country since Pence's 2020 stop in Boone, and the first visit focused specifically on Ashe County since the Clinton-Gore trip 27 years earlier.
Boone has also hosted a former president: on April 29, 2008, Bill Clinton — by then out of office for more than seven years — spoke at Appalachian State University's Varsity Gymnasium at 3:15 p.m. while campaigning for his wife, Hillary Clinton, during her Democratic presidential primary campaign. The stop was part of a busy day for Clinton, who also made appearances that afternoon in North Wilkesboro and at Elkin High School.
