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The Monument to the USS Phelps Carrying President Franklin D. Roosevelt
by John M. MacFarlane 2017
The plaque commemorating the visit of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the USS Phelps to Victoria BC. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection.)
The USS Phelps (DD–360) carried President FranklinD. Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to Victoria on September 30, 1937 to Victoria BC on a goodwill visit to Canada.
The USS Phelps (Photo from the Wikipedia collection. )
The USS Phelps (DD–360) was built by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation’s Fore River Shipyard, Quincy, Massachusetts and launched in 1935.
Premier T.D. Pattullo on board the U.S.S. Phelps; greeting American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt (Photo B-08121 from the British columbia Archives collection.)
The visit to Victoria was not the only presidential service of this vessel. In November 1936 Phelps, along with the cruiser Chester, escorted the heavy cruiser Indianapolis carrying President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Buenos Aires, Argentina for the opening of the Inter-American Peace Conference of 1936. The cruise included good-will visits to Montevideo, Uruguay and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
To quote from this article please cite:
MacFarlane, John M. (2017) The Monument to the USS Phelps Carrying President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Nauticapedia.ca 2017. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Monument_USS_Phelps.php
Site News: April 17, 2024
The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 92,205 vessel histories (with 15,628 images and 13,173 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters). The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,616 entries (with 4,013 images).
In 2023 the Nauticapedia celebrated the 50th Anniversary of it’s original inception in 1973 (initially it was on 3" x 5" file cards). It has developed, expanded, digitized and enlarged in those ensuing years to what it is now online. If it was printed out it would fill more than 300,000 pages!
My special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into a semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.
Also my special thanks to my volunteer content accuracy checker, John Spivey of Irvine CA USA, who has proofread thousands of Nauticapedia vessel histories and provided input to improve more than 11,000 entries. His attention to detail has been a huge unexpected bonus in improving and updating the vessel detail content.