In the early 1920s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt contracted polio and purchased property near healing waters at Warm Springs, Georgia. FDR made nearly 50 visits to Georgia over the next two decades and died of a stroke while having a portrait drawn in his Pine Mountain home on April 12, 1945.Roosevelt loved Pine Mountain and frequently visited his favorite view of a Georgia mixed pine-oak-hickory forest. He even planted a demonstration forest of 5,000 longleaf on his Georgia farm during the winter season of 1929-30 to lead the effort for conservation and to fight soil erosion. Only a few trees are left of that effort after a 1950s storm took out over half the stand.
FDR also inspired a Depression-era building campaign of the rustic style on government forests to support an ailing U.S. work force. Roosevelt reviewed the construction of Pine Mountain State Park's headquarters that was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Roosevelt's personal home, the Little White House, is surrounded by chestnut oaks, black oaks, mockernut hickory and eastern hemlock. He drove his car under many of the existing trees. FDR refused a major landscaping of the grounds in preference of the natural forest.
FDR was elected as the 32nd President and is the only President to serve four terms as President. Throughout his four terms in office, FDR had an enormous impact on America. Roosevelt worked tirelessly to end the Great Depression, including the creation and establishment of the New Deal implemented to assist America’s return to international prominence.
