J. W. Peavy and Franklin D. Roosevelt

By Barbara DeMarco



While compiling information about our PVs, I came across a land transaction between J. W. Peavy and Franklin D. Roosevelt in Meriwether County, GA on April 7, 1933. This is interesting because President Franklin D. Roosevelt owned property in Warm Springs, GA which is also in Meriwether Co. It was home to his Little White House and to the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, a hospital for polio patients founded by Roosevelt in 1927. The Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation is an internationally recognized comprehensive medical and vocational rehabilitation facility, providing services for people with many different types of disabilities.

To give you some background, Franklin D. Roosevelt was born at the family home, "Springwood," in Hyde Park, New York on January 30, 1882, to James Roosevelt and Sara Delano Roosevelt. He attended Groton (1896-1900), a prestigious preparatory school in Massachusetts, and received a BA degree in history from Harvard in only three years (1900-03). Roosevelt next studied law at New York's Columbia University. In 1905, he married a distant cousin, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, who was the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. The couple had six children, five of whom survived infancy: Anna (1906), James (1907), Elliott (1910), Franklin, Jr. (1914) and John (1916).

While vacationing at Campobello Island, New Brunswick in the summer of 1921, at the age of 39, Roosevelt contracted poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis). Despite courageous efforts to overcome his crippling illness, he never regained the use of his legs. He gave national recognition to Warm Springs when he visited the town's naturally heated mineral springs as treatment for his polio related paralysis in 1924. In time, he established a foundation at Warm Springs, Georgia to help other polio victims, and inspired, as well as directed, the March of Dimes program that eventually funded an effective vaccine. Roosevelt was so enchanted with Warm Springs that after serving as Governor of New York State in 1928 and elected as President of the United States in 1932 he built the only home he ever owned here - a modest, six room cottage called the Little White House which served as a relaxing, comfortable haven for him during his regular visits to Warm Springs. It was here he is believed to have developed his New Deal policies that would affect the entire nation and where he relaxed and socialized.

He was elected three times to the Presidency and the unending stress and strain of the war literally wore Roosevelt out. By early 1944 a full medical examination disclosed serious heart and circulatory problems and although his physicians placed him on a strict regime of diet and medication, the pressures of war and domestic politics weighed heavily on him. During a vacation at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, he suffered a massive stroke and died two and one-half hours later without regaining consciousness. He was 63 years old. His death came on the eve of complete military victory in Europe and within months of victory over Japan in the Pacific.

The question is---could J. W. Peavy have owned the land where the former President built his Little White House or the Warm Springs Foundation?? Possibility!! In any event J. W. probably met and even shook the hand of this great man.


Land Transfer of J.W.Peavy and Franklin D. Roosevelt
This transaction is listed 12th from the bottom of this file.




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