NY -- Hyde Park -- Home of Franklin D Roosevelt NHS:
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon
underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
- Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 3.140.185.147 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
- Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
|
[1]
 FDR_560017_04.JPG
|
[2]
FDR_560017_10.JPG
|
- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- FDR_560017_04.JPG: FDR Home
- FDR_560017_10.JPG: FDR Grave
- AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
- Wikipedia Description: Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site preserves the Springwood estate in Hyde Park, New York, United States of America. Springwood was the birthplace, life-long home, and burial place of the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The National Historic Site was established in 1945.
History of the estate:
The land of the Springwood estate was originally part of a land grant (the "Great Nine Partners Patent") which covered the area between the Hudson River in the west and the border of Connecticut in the East. The total area of the grant was about 567 square kilometers and it was given to a group of nine businessmen from New York City by the English Crown in 1697. To insure equal access to the river for all partners, the land on the river shore was divided into nine "Water Lots". The Springwood estate is located on such a Water Lot, which was granted to a partner in the grant named William Creed.
While the early history of the house on the Springwood estate remains unclear, it is believed that the central portion of the present day house is formed by a large farmhouse which was constructed around the year 1800 in the Federal Style. In 1845, the estate was purchased by Josiah Wheeler, a merchant from New York City. Wheeler undertook a remodelling of the house, giving it a - then fashionable - Italianate Style with a three-storey tower at the south end as well as front and rear piazzas spanning the entire length of the house. After this remodelling, the house comprised a total of 15 rooms.
The estate, which also comprised about one square mile (2.5 square kilometers) of land at the time, was bought in this condition by Franklin D. Roosevelt's father, James Roosevelt in 1866 for a price of 40,000 US dollars. At this time, a stable and a horse track had been built already, which was important to James Roosevelt since he took a great interest in horse breeding. From right after the purchase until his death 34 years later, James Roosevelt had many improvements of the house carried out. He enlarged the servants' wing of the building and added two rooms. He also had a spacious carriage house built in the vicinity.
In 1915, Franklin D. Roosevelt together his mother Sara undertook a final major enlargement and remodelling of the home. This was done in order to accommodate his growing family, but also to create an environment for entertaining his political associates which fitted his ambitions. Franklin D. Roosevelt contributed many ideas for the new design, but since the building work was paid for by his mother Sara, she had to find compromises which also took the financial aspect into account. She commissioned the design work the firm of Hoppin and Koen from New York City. The size of the house was more than doubled by adding two large fieldstone wings (designed by Franklin D. Roosevelt), a tower, and a third storey with a flat roof. The clapboard exterior of the house was replaced with stucco and most of the porch was replaced with a fieldstone terrace with a balustrade and a small columned portico around the entrance. These alterations gave the exterior of the house the look of a mansion in Colonial Revival Style. The interior retained much of the layout of the old family home and was designed primarily with housing Franklin D. Roosevelt's growing collections of books, paintings, stamps, and coins. The remodelling work was finished within one year in 1916. Franklin Roosevelt also changed the appearance of the surrounding land by extensive planting of trees. Between 1911, when the large scale planting started and Roosevelt's death in 1945, more than 400,000 trees were planted on the estate. Eventually, large portions of the estate were turned into an experimental forestry station under an agreement with the Forestry Department of the Syracuse University.
In 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt donated the estate to the American people under the condition that his family maintained a life-time right to usage of the property. On November 21, 1945, after the family had relinquished their rights, the estate was transferred to the U.S. Department of the Interior. Since then, the estate has been administered by the National Park Service as a National Historic Site and is open to the public. In 2005, the site covered a total area of more than 3 square kilometers and received 108,611 visitors.
Use by Franklin D. Roosevelt:
Franklin D. Roosevelt was born in what was then the second floor tower bedroom at the south end of the house. At the time, it functioned as the master bedroom; the bedroom which he and later his sons used during boyhood is nearby on the same floor. After marrying Eleanor Roosevelt in 1905, the young couple moved in with his mother. The estate remained the center of Roosevelt's life in all stages of his career. During his presidency alone, he came for almost 200 visits. The estate functioned as a "Summer White House", where the president hosted his political associates as well as other prominent national and international figures. In June 1939, when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth made the first visit of a reigning British monarch to the United States, they were hosted at Springwood. Franklin D. Roosevelt used the estate as a retreat for himself and his political associates on the eves of all elections in which he ran for president. When the incoming results indicated that he had won the election, he would go outside onto the front terrace to deliver his acceptance speech. Franklin D. Roosevelt made his last visit to Springwood in the last week of March 1945, about two weeks before his death. At his own wish, he was buried near the sundial in the Rose Garden on April 15, 1945. His wife was buried at his side after her death in 1962.
Rooms:
Entrance Hall:
The walls of the entrance hall are mostly covered with pieces from Franklin D. Roosevelt's collection of paintings. On display are mainly naval paintings as well as some historical cartoons. Specimens from his boyhood collection of birds are also on display as well as sculpture of him when he was 29. In the corner behind the main staircase is a manually operated trunk elevator, which the disabled president used to move between floors.
Living room and library:
This room was the place were Franklin D. Roosevelt worked on his private collections, he accumulated a personal library of approximately 14,000 volumes, over 2,000 naval paintings, prints, and lithographs, over 300 bird specimens, over 200 ship models, 1.2 million stamps, as well as thousands of coins, banknotes, campaign buttons, and medallions.
Music room:
The music room (also known as the "Dresden Room" for the origin of some of the porcelain) is a formal parlor which contains many Chinese pieces of porcelain and lacquerware. These were acquired when the family of Franklin D. Roosevelt's mother stayed in China, where her father made a fortune in the China trade. Together with the adjacent dining room, this part of the house was the setting for the formal entertaining of guests. These guests included the Prime Ministers Winston Churchill (United Kingdom) and Mackenzie King (Canada), as well as European royalty such as the King and Queen of Britain (in 1939), Queen Wilhelmina, Princess Juliana, and Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands, Prince Olaf and Princess Märtha of Norway. A collection of autographed photographs of these guests is kept in the room on the piano.
Bedrooms of Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt:
During the enlargement of the house in 1915, a suite of rooms was created for Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt in one of the new wings. Originally, these rooms included a sitting room and two dressing rooms, but after Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted a paralytic illness in 1921, one of the dressing rooms was converted into a separate bedroom for his wife Eleanor and the sitting room into a bedroom for his mother Sara.
The "Snuggery":
This room was used by Franklin D. Roosevelt's mother Sara for beginning her day and conducting her business of running the household. The room was created in its present form during the extensive remodelling of 1915 by a division of the old South Parlor into a gallery and the Snuggery. Because most of the furniture of the old parlor was retained despite the reduced the size, the Snuggery has a cluttered appearance.
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
- Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].
