The Creation of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library: A Personal Narrative

learned that on the previous day President Franklin D. Roosevelt had announced to a party of 18 persons assembled at luncheon in the White House a long-cherished plan to present to the United States his already vast accumulation of correspondence and other papers, documents, books, pamphlets, pictures, and objects of personal or historic interest.He proposed to place these collections in a building which should be erected at private cost, on a plot of land donated to the United States from the estate then owned by his mother, on the Albany Post Road about 5 miles north of Poughkeepsie, N. Y.At the same time he announced his expectation that the rest of the hundred acres or more between the Post Road and the Hudson River, on which the family residence was situated, would, as he expressed it, "eventually go to the Federal Government to be maintained for the benefit of the public.