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NCHPAD - Building Healthy Inclusive Communities

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A Brief History


The Institute's property had its recorded beginnings with Native Americans, whose tribal battles often led injured warriors to the water at the base of Pine Mountain for what they considered its healing properties. In the years that followed white settlement, the warm springs gave rise to a spa, where water emerging at 900 gallons per minute and 88 degrees year-round helped turn the site into a well-known stagecoach stop. Nearing the turn of the century, well-to-do families from the area began erecting summer homes. The Meriwether Inn, a popular, 120-room Victorian hotel, opened on the hill overlooking the springs. A large public swimming pool was also built to permit better access to the warm, buoyant waters, and the Inn became host to Georgia high society through the early 1900s.

Rich with a powerful and inspirational history, the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation was originally purchased and founded in 1927 by Franklin D. Roosevelt as the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation.

When FDR, a well-known New York politician and aristocrat, arrived on October 3, 1924, three years into his personal struggle with polio, the Inn had seen its better days. It was the first of 41 visits Roosevelt would make to Warm Springs, many of which came after he became governor of New York in 1928 and president for the first of four terms in 1932. Although he never regained use of his legs without braces, therapy in the spring water provided relief and improved his weakened muscles. This led him to purchase the property with two-thirds of his personal fortune. It soon became a world-renowned polio treatment center and remained so after Roosevelt's death at Warm Springs on April 12, 1945. Famous for its warm, mountain spring-fed therapeutic swimming pools, the campus-like Institute was the nation's first rehabilitation center for children and adults with severe disabilities.

Sparked by FDR's legacy, nationwide fund-raising led to the development of the Salk Vaccine (1954), which effectively eradicated new cases of polio in the United States by the mid-1960s. As a result, shifting focus evolved and the adjacent Georgia Rehabilitation Center was created in 1964 to provide vocational rehabilitation for persons with disabilities throughout the State of Georgia. Ten years later, the state assumed operation of the Foundation hospital, turning it into a medical rehabilitation facility that today specializes in brain injury, spinal cord injury, stroke, post-polio, orthopedic, and general rehabilitation services. In 1980, the separate medical and vocational programs were merged into one comprehensive state-managed rehabilitation facility.

The Campus
Because of its 20th century history as a rehabilitation center for children with polio, the scenically picturesque medical campus is barrier-free and wheelchair-accessible. Fountains and statues adorn the wooded walkways, which interlace through a courtyard surrounded on four sides by plantation-like white-pillared buildings. These buildings include a natatorium housing an indoor swimming pool. A library, dining hall, gift shop, post office, auditorium, professional offices and overnight hotel-like rooms also surround the courtyard. A major center of activity is a 64-bed medical unit that provides comprehensive rehabilitation services, while in the vocational unit nearby, there is a 175-bed residential setting that provides people with mental or physical disabilities an opportunity to develop vocational goals and learn to live independently. Currently, there are 60 inpatients in the medical rehab unit, and about 160 in the Institute's vocational rehab section.

The Institute also offers comprehensive outpatient rehabilitation services for children and adults. These include the following special services: a swimming program focusing on aquatic therapy and community activities, a transitional living program, a diabetic foot center, post-polio clinic, rehabilitation technology center, and a seating and wheeled mobility clinic.


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