TRAVEL
A legacy of FDR lives in west central Georgia Travels with Charlie Veteran Georgia journalist Charles Seabrook has covered native wildlife and environmental issues for decades. For “Travels with Charlie,” he visits and photographs communities throughout the state.
Driving around Meriwether and Harris counties in west central Georgia, I can almost feel the presence of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the nation’s 32nd President.
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Reminders of Roosevelt are everywhere there — from wall-size murals and FDR memorabilia in small towns to the Little White House and 9,049— acre F.D. Roosevelt State Park on Pine Mountain. Long before becoming a world leader, Roosevelt visited the town of Warm Springs in Meriwether County in October 1924 to get relief in the naturally warm water there for his polio-paralyzed legs. The water, which stays a constant 88 degrees Fahrenheit and is deemed therapeutic, flowed from natural springs into man-made pools. Swimming in the buoyant, mineral-laden water gave Roosevelt relief, but no miracle cure. At the time, the only lodging in Warm Springs
JANUARY 2022 | AtlantaSeniorLife.com
(formerly Bullochville) was the dilapidated Meriwether Inn. In 1927, Roosevelt bought the old inn and the 1,700-acre farm surrounding it. He built his own six-room cottage just outside the town in 1932, shortly before he was elected to the Oval Office. When he was President, the cottage became his “Little White House and retreat from Washington.” He died there on April 12, 1945, near the end of World War II, of a cerebral hemorrhage. In all, between 1924 and 1945, Roosevelt, a native New Yorker, visited Warm Springs and Georgia 41 times, generally in late March and April and again in the fall. During those visits, when not exercising in the pools or attending to presidential business in the Little White
House, he rode around the countryside in his convertible, picnicked on Pine Mountain and fished in the nearby Flint River. He also dearly loved to visit the small towns and talk to the rural folks, whose lives had been upended by the Great Depression, the boll weevil and plunging cotton prices. A generation of West Georgians came to regard Roosevelt as their trusted friend. In October 1928, while he was visiting with folk in the town of Manchester in Meriwether County, New York Democrat leaders reached him by telephone to ask him to run for governor of that state. He ran, and won, and four years later was elected President of the United States. According to historians, some of the initiatives in his administration’s pivotal New Deal program were inspired by the struggling farmers and others that he met during his drives around west Georgia — initiatives such as the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the Rural Electrification Administration. Indeed, Roosevelt in 1938 called Warm Springs the birthplace of the REA. One other way that Roosevelt still is remembered in Georgia is through the Roosevelt Institute for Rehabilitation to treat polio and other paralyzing maladies. He established it in 1927, after hearing about a boy who had regained the use of his legs through hydrotherapy, which used water for treatment. The institute was funded by the Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, later the March of Dimes. The institute is now called the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation and is a comprehensive rehabilitation facility operated by the state of Georgia.
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