FDR's Little White House & Callaway Gardens

Franklin Roosevelt first came to Warm Springs in 1924, drawn by reports that the town's naturally warm 88°F mineral springs — flowing at a constant temperature year-round from the Pine Mountain ridge — offered relief from the paralysis that had struck him three years earlier. He returned 89 times between 1924 and 1945, eventually purchasing the springs and surrounding land and commissioning a modest six-room Georgia pine cottage in 1932, before his first presidential term, as a private retreat he called the Little White House. The cottage sits exactly as it did on April 12, 1945: the leather chair, the card table, the unfinished Impressionist portrait on the easel, all frozen in the moment Roosevelt suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage while posing. The warm spring pool where he swam, which he believed had restored measurable strength to his paralyzed legs, is accessible on the grounds. Poignantly, his companion Lucy Rutherfurd — with whom he had rekindled a wartime relationship, and who had arranged the portrait sitting with artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff — was present when he collapsed; Eleanor Roosevelt was in Washington and was not there when he died.

The adjoining museum tells the full arc of Roosevelt's relationship with Warm Springs, from his first tentative swim in 1924 through his final hours. The centerpiece artifacts are devastating in their intimacy: the unfinished Shoumatoff portrait, oil still wet with the brushstrokes made hours before his death; his 1938 Ford Phaeton convertible fitted with hand controls that allowed him to drive himself around the Georgia countryside without assistance, one of his most fiercely guarded expressions of independence; and the heavy steel leg braces he wore for public appearances while carefully concealing his inability to walk unaided. The museum also documents the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, the polio treatment center Roosevelt established on the grounds in 1927, which treated thousands of polio patients before Jonas Salk's vaccine made it obsolete. The surrounding historic village of Warm Springs retains its Roosevelt-era storefronts and a soda fountain where FDR famously stopped for refreshment on his drives through town.

Callaway Gardens is a 13,000-acre resort and botanical preserve created by textile magnate Cason Callaway in the 1950s, built on land his family had purchased in the 1930s with the ambition of returning its eroded, exhausted cotton fields to natural abundance. The estate today encompasses lakes, forests, an azalea collection of more than 700 native varieties (at their peak in March and April, they carpet the hillsides in a spectacle that draws visitors from across the South), 13 miles of trails, and the Virginia Hand Callaway Discovery Center. The crown jewel is the Cecil B. Day Butterfly Center, a soaring glass conservatory opened in 1988 that was at the time the largest glass-enclosed butterfly house in North America. Inside, the temperature holds at a steady 80°F year-round, recreating the lush humidity of a tropical rainforest where approximately 1,000 live butterflies from more than 50 species — drawn from Central and South America, Asia, and Africa — drift freely through flowering plants, land on visitors, and complete their full life cycles from egg to chrysalis to winged adult. The experience of standing inside the warm glass dome while a Blue Morpho settles on your shoulder remains one of the most memorable encounters Georgia's natural attractions have to offer.