Hyde Park

We spent a day with the Roosevelt’s starting with an excellent tour of Springwood, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s home from childhood. As an only child, FDR lived a most privileged life doted upon by his mother Sara. After college he returned to the home with his new bride Eleanor. The house contains his collection of birds he had shot, naval pictures, political cartoons and an extensive library. Through his terms as Governor of New York and President of the United States, it remained his home.



Eleanor was never comfortable in the home run by her mother-in-law so Franklin helped design her own home known at Val-Kill. Where Springwood was a more stately manor, Val-Kill was a comfortable cottage, though originally it was a factory where local men, unemployed during the Great Depression, learned to make furniture. Eleanor entertained such luminaries as Churchill, Nehru, Khrushchev and a young candidate named John F. Kennedy. She continued to live in the home until her death. Both FDR and Eleanor are buried in the rose garden near Springwood.




The Stone Cottage near Val-Kill was home to Eleanor’s assistants and later her son.

The library and museum chronicle his early political career through his four terms as president. The private study and oval office desk contain items from his time in the White House. The map room where he followed the action of World War II is replicated in life scale.