The springs at Warm Springs had been drawing people to this corner of Meriwether County long before anyone recorded them — tradition holds that Muscogee Creek people brought ailing warriors here to heal. Franklin Roosevelt arrived in October 1924, paralyzed from the waist down, drawn by water that held at 88 degrees and the hope it might ease what polio had taken three years earlier. It didn't cure him, but he kept coming back. In 1926 he bought the resort property and roughly 1,200 acres. In 1927 he incorporated the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, turning a declining Victorian resort into the first hospital devoted solely to treating polio. In 1932 he built a six-room Georgia pine house on the grounds. He made sixteen trips here as president. On April 12, 1945, sitting for a portrait, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died. The house has been preserved as it was that day. The portrait is still unfinished.
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