Where did Eleanor Roosevelt grow up and live?

📍Val-Kill Lane, Hyde Park, New York 12538, USA

1926 – 1962

“Val-Kill was the only home I ever owned myself — a stone cottage on the Roosevelt estate at Hyde Park that Franklin had built for me and my friends Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman in 1926. The Big House at Hyde Park was Franklin's and his mother Sara's; Val-Kill was mine. After Franklin died in 1945 I made it my permanent home, and it was from this modest cottage that I wrote my newspaper column, received world leaders, and did the work of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Val-Kill gave me the privacy and the independence that the White House had never provided. I could wear what I liked, invite whom I liked, work at any hour. The cottage and the surrounding woodland were the first place I had lived entirely on my own terms.”

👍 LovedThe independence and privacy that Val-Kill provided after decades of public life. The freedom to live on my own terms in a household I controlled. The woodland walks along the Val-Kill stream.

👎 DislikedThe loneliness of widowhood in a house built partly as an escape from a complicated marriage. The physical distance from New York and the UN work. The cottage's modesty after the grandeur of the White House.

Map showing where Eleanor Roosevelt lived — Val-Kill Lane, Hyde Park, New York 12538, USA

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Eleanor Roosevelt's home at Val-Kill Lane, Hyde Park, New York 12538, USA

📍 Street view today

Sources: Cook, B. Eleanor Roosevelt Volume 1 (1992), Viking; Roosevelt, E. The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (1961), Harper