Presidents on My Mind

In Georgia with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter

A couple of wonderful presidents were on our route as we traveled through Georgia dodging the frozen north in January.

We stopped at Jimmy Carter’s tiny hometown, Plains, Georgia, with its museum, home place, and current home.

Jimmy Carter’s birthplace, a modest farmhouse.

At the school turned museum for Jimmy Carter, there’s an unattended replica of President Carter’s Oval Office. It felt good to sit there, especially with the curtains matching my scarf.

Billy Carter’s gas station along the main street in Plains. Billy was Jimmy Carter’s rogue brother.

Near the state park we visited Warm Springs where Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a modest home built. When he became president, it was called the Little White House and is now a state historic site. We stood by the chair where the president suffered a stroke and by his single bed in his small bedroom where he died a few hours later, April 11, 1945.

This is where FDR was sitting, posing for a portrait, when he collapsed. He never regained consciousness and died a few hours later.

Artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff was painting FDR’s portrait when he collapsed. The unfinished watercolor is exhibited in the home.

We spent four days at FD Roosevelt State Park in a cabin built by the CCC–the Civilian Conservation Corps–in the 1930s. It was a National Recovery Act program invented by Roosevelt after he was elected during the nation’s worst economic depression. The program employed an army of out-of-work young men to build wonderful stone structures on public lands throughout our nation. Many of the buildings, picnic shelters, stone-lined paths, and roads are still striking features across the country today.

We have seen the CCC’s handiwork from the Blue Ridge Parkway to Saguaro National Park to Watoga State Park in West Virginia. The program was a model of public works projects.

In front of the visitor’s center at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt State Park in Georgia is a tribute to the thousands of men who found jobs in the CCC. In this public works project, they built stone structures in parks all over the country including this visitor’s center.

We stayed in one of the beautiful stone cabins built by the CCC along a ridgeline in the hills of Western Georgia.

In our CCC cabin at FDR Park, I admired the stonework of the fireplace–and built a roaring fire every night. Catnip for a city kiddie.