Food Feature: A Warm Springs welcome
Little details charm at Little White House
Almost 60 years after death, Franklin D. Roosevelt should probably be long gone from the Little White House. Considering the wishbones in the kitchen waiting to be snapped and the gleaming Nancy-Drew style roadster parked (behind glass) in the garage, it seems likely that the 32nd president is simply indisposed.
A day in Warm Springs, an hour south of Atlanta, is a day spent inside a snow globe. No swirling plastic weather, but an irresistible sense of entering a world where time threw up its hands and stopped, and everything is cherished. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the Little White House in 1945. Garrulous park rangers revere the property as if it happened just last week.
Roosevelt built the Little White House in a rural middle Georgia town where healing waters were promoted as a polio treatment. The springs weren’t magical — just 88 degrees channeled into shallow swimming pools for hydrotherapy — but escape from the rigors of Washington apparently charmed the president, according to the creaky black-and-white newsreel playing in the museum. The Little White House is one part mountain cabin, two parts world affairs. The black Bakelite hotline to Washington — disconnected, should you feel the urge to call out the fighter jets — sits in a pine cubbyhole near a homey couch.
The memorabilia collection is crowded into another house on the property, past the Walk of States, hinting in state-shaped carvings of indigenous stones at the weirdly charming Americana to come. Clumsily pasted over the president’s waving hand on one of scores of photos are white stick-on letters spelling out “Hiya neighbor!”
Hundreds of walking canes sent to Roosevelt by admirers fill display cases. (He was unable to use them, but his public never knew it.) A carved pugilistic bulldog, an Uncle Sam head, and twin canes inscribed “Iowa Fights!” are homemade love tokens from another era.
Maybe it’s the small home’s intimacy (wander past the bathroom, which features rudimentarily adaptations for Roosevelt’s needs, like the toilet raised to wheelchair height on a block), but much is laid bare in Warm Springs. No short shrift is given to memorabilia from F.D.R.’s unprecedented four-term presidency, but the focus is squarely on the minutiae of daily life — down to scratches on the front door purportedly left by Fala, Roosevelt’s Scottish terrier.
The springs themselves are a mile away. The pools where Roosevelt and other patients exercised are drained, but in a concrete trough, a sample of bathtub temperature water burbles up from underground. Before you leave, make sure you look at the pencil scrawl over the enamel stove back at the Little White House. It’s a message to the world from Roosevelt’s cook, commemorating her own place in history.
F.D.R.’s Little White House State Historic Site. 401 Little White House Road, Warm Springs. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. Admission is $2 for kids, $5 for adults, $4 for seniors. Take I-85 South to exit 41. Turn left and go 33 miles to Warm Springs. 706-655-5870. www.FDR-littlewhitehouse.org.