Franklin Roosevelt first came to Warm Springs in 1924, seeking relief from the paralytic illness he'd contracted three years earlier. He kept coming back. A decade later, the Civilian Conservation Corps established a camp near what is now the park entrance on Highway 354, and from that base young men built the Liberty Bell Pool, the Roosevelt Lodge, stone and log cabins, and two lakes — Lake Delanor and Lake Franklin — out of the Pine Mountain Ridge. At Dowdell's Knob, the park's highest point at 1,395 feet, Roosevelt used to picnic and bring polio patients with him. Because the western half of the park preserves that CCC design largely intact, it was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1997. The cabins still stand. The lakes still hold water. What those young men made by hand on this ridge has outlasted nearly everything.
