Sagamore Hill

Sagamore Hill was the home of Theodore Roosevelt's heart. For more than thirty years it was where the most restless president in American history hiked, wrote, romped with his six children, and received kings, diplomats, and reporters. As the 'Summer White House' from 1902 to 1908 it was a genuine seat of government — Roosevelt mediated the end of a world war from its rooms — and it was here, on a winter night in 1919, that he died. No place captures the energy, family life, and outsized personality of TR more completely.

Theodore Roosevelt bought land on Cove Neck above Oyster Bay in 1880 and planned a home he intended to call 'Leeholm' for his bride, Alice Hathaway Lee. When Alice and his mother both died on the same day in February 1884, a grief-stricken Roosevelt renamed the estate Sagamore Hill after Sagamore Mohannis, a Matinecock leader who had once signed away rights to the land. The 23-room Queen Anne house, designed by the firm Lamb & Rich, was completed in 1885.

Sagamore Hill became the boisterous center of Roosevelt family life, and after 1901 the summer capital of the United States. In 1905 Roosevelt added the great North Room, a trophy hall hung with the heads of animals he had hunted and gifts from heads of state. That same year, working from Sagamore Hill and nearby Oyster Bay, he mediated the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War — an achievement that made him the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Roosevelt returned to Sagamore Hill after leaving office and lived there through the loss of his youngest son, Quentin, in the First World War. He died in his sleep at the house on January 6, 1919. Edith Roosevelt remained until her death in 1948. In 1962 Congress established Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, and the National Park Service preserves the house much as the Roosevelts left it, down to the books on the shelves.