Top Cottage: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site

Holder, Kirsten; Brown, Margie

The Top Cottage landscape is part of the 836-acre Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site (NHS), located within the Town of Hyde Park, in Dutchess County, New York. The Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) NHS preserves and interprets properties associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), the thirty-second president of the United States. FDR was elected to an unprecedented four terms during which he led the United States through the Great Depression and World War II. The park includes a large portion of the former Roosevelt Estate, which covered 1,522 acres at time of FDR’s death in 1945. The core of the park is the Roosevelt main residence known as the Home and the adjacent Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum (outside park boundaries) within the limits of the original portion of the estate known as Springwood. Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, a separate park unit within the historic boundaries of the Roosevelt Estate downhill from Top Cottage, preserves Mrs. Roosevelt’s country home known as Val-Kill. Top Cottage is within the historic limits of nine farm properties known as the Upland Farms that FDR acquired between 1911 and 1938, largely for conservation purposes. In addition to Top Cottage, a Dutch Colonial Revival style stone building erected in 1938-1939 and restored in 1999, the CLI project area includes an historic entrance drive, loop driveway, woods road, stone walls, lawn, specimen trees, and deciduous hardwoods forest. FDR selected the hilltop location for its peace and quiet away from the Home at Springwood, and for the dramatic westward views across the Hudson Valley toward the Catskill Mountains to the north and the Shawangunk Mountains to the south, which remain but are partly obscured. Many changes made after FDR’s death in 1945 have been removed, although some post-1945 plantings and an expanded lawn remain. Post-1945 successional woods also continue to cover historically open fields south and east of Top Cottage, and suburban residential subdivisions occupy historically wooded and farmed land to the east, south, and west. Today, visitors can access Top Cottage on a park van that includes a ranger-led tour, or on foot from the Top Cottage Trail that is part of the Hyde Park Trails system, which connects with Val-Kill and Springwood to the west.

Top Cottage: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site

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