When the president of the United States comes to your town, especially towns in western Wisconsin, it is a historic event.  Local historians tell us that nearly a dozen presidents have traveled to La Crosse County, dating back to the 1880’s.  Sometimes, they stayed the night, while others were basically passing through.  

The first documented visit to the city by a president happened in the fall of 1887, when Grover Cleveland came to La Crosse during a train tour of the Midwest.  The next official presidential stop would come more than 15 years later, when Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech at Market Square, where a parking ramp is located now.  Estimates of the crowd size have ranged from 7000 people to as many as 40,000.  

Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, visited La Crosse early in his term, in 1909, to attend the opening for a YMCA building at 7th and Main Streets.  Much of the audience which gathered for an address by Taft stood across the street from the Y, in Burns Park.  

After the visit from Taft, Harry Truman became the only president to make a scheduled stop in La Crosse until the 1970’s.  Truman appeared in the city during whistle-stop trips in 1949 and 1952, at two different railroad stations.  

During the 1976 presidential primary campaign, incumbent President Gerald Ford attended a Saturday night rally at the Mary E. Sawyer Auditorium on March 27th, saying he was happy to be in “God’s Country.”  

In the closing days of the 1992 presidential campaign, President George H.W. Bush stayed overnight at the old Holiday Inn on the pike on Halloween night.  The next morning, Bush did a live CNN interview inside the former Penney’s store downtown, and made a brief speech at the airport before flying out.  

On a cold January day in 1998, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore addressed a large crowd outside the La Crosse Center.  The Clinton rally happened a day after his State of the Union address to Congress, and just as the Monica Lewinsky scandal became headline news.  Before Clinton’s arrival, someone went to Pettibone Beach across the river and stamped the message “IMPEACH” in the snow.  Clinton was impeached later in the year.  

The next president got to La Crosse three times during his terms of office.  George W. Bush delivered a speech at Logan High School in 2002.  Two years later, during the 2004 campaign, Bush spoke to a crowd at Logger Field in Copeland Park, and campaigned shortly before the election at the Onalaska Omni Center.  

Like Clinton, Barack Obama held a rally outside the La Crosse Center, in 2008, but that was before he was elected president.  During his second term, Obama spoke at the UWL Recreational Eagle Center in July of 2015, making him the first sitting president to visit the La Crosse campus.  

Joe Biden paid one official visit to La Crosse as president, in June of 2021.  Biden went to the MTU facility on Isle La Plume, to promote mass transit.  Biden also made news by stopping at the Pearl ice cream shop downtown with Governor Tony Evers, to get an ice cream cone.  

Donald Trump has been a frequent La Crosse visitor, speaking at the La Crosse Center in April of 2016 and staying once that summer at the Charmant Hotel, both before he was elected.  In his first term, Trump led an October 2020 rally at the fairgrounds speedway in West Salem, and returned to La Crosse during his 2024 campaign to do a televised town hall inside the civic center.  He has not made an official La Crosse appearance during his second term, but there’s still time for that.

Published by Brad Williams on June 15th, 2026

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