Tradition holds that Muscogee Creek people brought ailing warriors to these springs long before anyone wrote anything down — the water runs at nearly 90°F, warm enough to matter, and that fact drew people across centuries. Savannah families came fleeing yellow fever. Atlanta money rode the railroad to Bullochville. By the time Franklin Roosevelt arrived in October 1924, paralyzed from the waist down, the Meriwether Inn was already in decline. He felt enough improvement in that warm water that in 1926 he bought the resort and roughly 1,200 acres, incorporated the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation in 1927, and turned a fading Victorian retreat into the first hospital devoted solely to treating polio. He built his Little White House here in 1932, visited sixteen times as president, and died here on April 12, 1945. The institute still operates. The water still runs warm.
