Warm Springs African American Heritage Sites

The Eleanor Roosevelt School, built in 1936 and opened in 1937, was a Rosenwald school — part of a program that built thousands of schools for Black children across the segregated South, funded by the Julius Rosenwald Fund in partnership with Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. Warm Springs' Black community sent their children here even as the town drew national attention to FDR's Little White House and polio treatment center nearby. The school stands as documented evidence of a Black community that lived and worked in Warm Springs through the Jim Crow era, receiving far less of the historical record than the famous retreat next door.