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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: January 14, 2025

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,957 vessel histories (with 16,337 images and 13,935 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3998 images).

My thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of the vessel histories in the vessel database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.

Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he continues to contribute to illustrate British Columbia’s floating heritage.

My very special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.

Thanks to John Spivey who is beginning his 4th year of fact checking all of the entries in the vessel database.

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