Top Cottage was FDR's hideaway

By Rebecca Rothbaum
Poughkeepsie Journal

Top Cottage • Franklin Roosevelt's retreat in Hyde Park. • Phone: (845) 229-7770. • Hours: Tours Thursday-Sunday. Tours leave from the Roosevelt Museum and Library, Route 9, Hyde Park. • Cost: $5. Related stories • FDR always proud of valley roots • FDR left mark on nation — and area's buildings • FDR legacy molds policy of present • Radio launched new era of political persuasion • Roosevelt's life, death still mystify • Together, Burroughs and Roosevelt champion nature • Springwood: Birthplace of Franklin D. Roosevelt

As a child, Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent many happy hours exploring the woods on Dutchess Hill.

Later, he took long drives there, often bringing friends to enjoy the view of the Shawangunk Ridge and Catskill Mountains.

So it is little wonder that when he began planning for a presidential retreat, he thought of the Hyde Park summit. He had even hoped to retire to the simple stone home he built there, which he aptly named Top Cottage.

Today, after years as a private residence, Top Cottage is a National Parks site open to the public. Guided tours take visitors there -- the centerpiece of a bus tour of Roosevelt's Hyde Park -- offering a glimpse at a more personal side of the former president.

''It's an extremely important part of the FDR story,'' said David Woolner, executive director of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, which led the restoration of Top Cottage, along with the Open Space Institute and the Roosevelt Family Committee.

''Springwood is beautiful and Roosevelt helped renovate it, but his parents bought it,'' Woolner continued. ''Top Cottage was his own. It was his little Shangri-La.''

Couldn't find calm

Soon after he was elected in 1933, Roosevelt began to realize his family's home, Springwood, could not provide the calm he sought during his visits to Hyde Park.

''The trips were intended primarily for a holiday -- a chance to read, sort my books, and to make plans for roads, tree plantings, etc.,'' Roosevelt wrote in a memo dated Dec. 9, 1942. ''This was seemingly impossible because of

(a) visitors in the house

(b) telephone calls

(c) visits from Dutchess county neighbors

(d) visits from various people who, knowing I was going to be in Hyde Park, thought it an opportune time to seek some interview.

Therefore, I began talking about building a small place to go to escape the mob.''

Roosevelt not only picked the site -- purchasing the 118-acres known as Dutchess Hill in 1937 -- but he also designed the house, styling it after the Dutch colonial architecture of which he was so fond. During his presidency, Roosevelt designed five post offices and three schools in the style, which was meant to recall the Hudson Valley's past and celebrate his own Dutch roots. He enlisted the help of a professional, Henry Toombs, to complete the project, although it was Roosevelt who signed off as the architect in 1939.

His imprint is most clearly seen in the house's wheelchair accessibility. Crippled by polio in 1922, Roosevelt designed the house so he would be able to move about it freely, creating a world in which he was completely independent and comfortable.

''When the King and Queen of England came to visit, he set up a card table and buttered toast for them,'' Woolner said, pointing out the confidence and ease which Roosevelt seemed to have exuded.

During Roosevelt's third and fourth terms, Top Cottage became ''a kind of Camp David,'' as Allan Dailey, director of the site, put it, where he met with visiting dignitaries and world leaders.

The most famous of these meetings included the June 1939 ''picnic'' for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, when the Roosevelts served their guests American favorites such as hot dogs. Coming on the eve of World War II, the event is considered by many the beginning of the warm relationship shared by the United States and England.

FDR and Churchill

Another of those important encounters came when Roosevelt and Winston Churchill discussed the use of the atomic bomb, leading to the Hyde Park declaration.

Still, Woolner said, Roosevelt only brought those with whom he felt comfortable to Top Cottage. And it was there that he sat for one of the only two known photographs of him in a wheelchair. The photograph hangs in the now-empty parlour of Top Cottage (all of the furniture was auctioned after his death) and shows a relaxed FDR with Ruthie Bie, the daughter of the Top Cottage caretaker.

Significantly, the photographer was Margaret Daisey Suckley, Roosevelt's sixth cousin. After he contracted polio, she became Roosevelt's confidante and companion. In letters and diaries, which were discovered after her death in 1991 at the age of 100, she expressed a wish to retire to Top Cottage along with Roosevelt.

Of course, that never happened. Roosevelt himself never retired there. He died in 1945, five months after he was elected to a fourth term. His son Elliot briefly lived at Top Cottage. Then came the Potter family, who lived there until the Open Space Institute bought the property in 1996.

Restoration removed features Elliot Roosevelt had added, such as dormer windows and a mud room, and trimmed trees obscuring the view of the mountains to the west. Visitors can now sit on the porch where Roosevelt entertained his famous guests and gaze at his favorite panorama.

''If the idea was to make it peaceful, a getaway,'' mused visitor Mary Ann Saul, ''then it looks like it worked.''