Little White House
Warm Springs, Georgia
This was another one of those unexpected stops, on a list of places I had hoped to visit, but did not quite see how I would find myself in Warm Springs, Georgia, at President Franklin Roosevelt’s Little White House.
It was a stop that included Andersonville, the Confederate Prisoner of War facility, including the museum; as well as a visit to Americus, where Habitat for Humanity was birthed.
Warm Springs is where President F. D. Roosevelt went to recover in 1924, after having contracted polio three years earlier, he found a curative freedom in the local’s waters, which he promoted to raise to awareness of the disease, and to offers others stricken with polio an opportunity to partake in what were viewed as healing waters.
While Senator Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency, he paid a visit to the small white house, where President Roosevelt spent as much as he could. This iconic picture is of Senator Kennedy looking at Madame Elizabeth Shoumatoff’s “Unfinished Portrait” that President Roosevelt had been posing for, when he had a stroke, on April 12, 1945, that led to his death.
The compound is well preserved, with the items that it houses being very closely connected the President, as opposed to reproduced or period pieces, the National Park Services, which manage the property claim that it remains as it was the day the President died.
Though out of the way, I truly found this visit well worth the effort of getting there; and enlightening about the man and the illness which impacted his life.
https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/presidents/roosevelts_little_white_house.html
post card credits: Curteichocolor, Aerial Photography Services,
