House that Teddy built

COVE NECK, N.Y. -- The big house has been a pretty lonely place for a while now. It has been 31/2 years since the public has been able to walk through Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt's sprawling family home near Oyster Bay on the North Shore of Long Island. In December 2011 the doors closed, most of the artifacts were shipped out and crews of workers moved in for a $10 million restoration. Strollers on the grounds have been able to sit on its big front porch or press their noses to the windows, but the house itself has been locked up tight.

That has changed, with the reopening of the house July 12.

It is an enticing, exciting time for history buffs, nature lovers or real estate voyeurs. Visitors will see few big changes. One of the great virtues of Sagamore Hill is that it stayed in family hands from the time it was built in 1886 until the 1950s, when the nonprofit Theodore Roosevelt Association took it over. In 1963, the association presented the house, and the 83 acres surrounding it, to the American people, and the Park Service has managed it ever since.

With so few owners, the house has remained more or less intact. Its 23 rooms retain their original furnishings and knickknacks and the profusion of stuffed animal heads, bear rugs, weird furniture and miles of books that Roosevelt amassed and displayed with no particular sense of order or design. It is an exuberant, extroverted house. It is most emphatically a family house, a place where children ran wild and Roosevelt, in some ways an overgrown child himself, expressed every facet of his outsize personality. For house snoopers, it is a trove. There is a lot to look at.

As for visible changes, there is one big addition and one big subtraction, but that's it. An extension of the kitchen at the rear of the house,

tacked onto the maid's porch in the 1950s, is gone. Inside, a light and air shaft removed around the same time has been reinstalled, improving the air flow and cutting down on condensation that was causing serious problems. Most of the restoration money went toward big-ticket but invisible work, much of it on the infrastructure. The boilers were replaced, the electrical wiring redone, the lighting modified and the security systems updated.

There was a lot of finicky restoration work, too. The taxidermy was showing its age. The oryx in the main hall, like many of its brethren, had developed age lines -- tiny cracks that specialists filled in with fine thread and then sealed with varnish. The rhino-foot inkwell in Roosevelt's third-floor study may or may not have gotten a pedicure, but the toenails shine. There are new food props in the big kitchen -- a ham on the stove, vegetables on the worktable and boxes of cookies. "We just got a box of cookies that smell like cinnamon," said Martin Christiansen, Sagamore Hill's chief of interpretation, visitor services and natural resources.

The books, all 8,000 of them, have been dusted and repaired. The wallpaper in the great North Room, a space added in 1905 at the insistence of the first lady, Edith Roosevelt, partly to accommodate her husband's junk, fell right off the wall when workers removed paintings. A specialist removed the pattern and reapplied it to new paper. Someone fortunately remembered to toss T.R.'s old Rough Rider hat onto the prong of an elk antler high overhead.

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After years of painstaking work, Sagamore Hill looks exactly like itself, only better. And thanks to improved lighting, you can see it, too, especially the North Room, formerly a realm of deep shadows.

When Roosevelt first set foot in Sagamore Hill, in 1885, he was still in his 20s, a three-time assemblyman for New York state with a long, turbulent career ahead of him: North Dakota rancher, unsuccessful candidate for mayor of New York, irrepressible reformer on the Civil Service Commission, swashbuckling police commissioner, assistant secretary of the Navy, leader of the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, governor of New York, vice president to William McKinley.

All this before the age of 42, when McKinley's assassination thrust Roosevelt into the Oval Office, where he set about curbing corporate power, earning his Trust-Buster nickname, and brokered an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Expeditions to Africa and South America sandwiched an unsuccessful presidential run on the Bull Moose ticket in 1912. It was a busy life.

The house was intended for his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, but in 1884, just as the final plans were being drawn up, she died after giving birth to their daughter, Alice Lee Roosevelt. Only after marrying his second wife, Edith, in 1886, did he take possession. Three of their five children were born there, and there the couple lived for the remainder of their lives, when not interrupted by Roosevelt's public career.

If history is your passion, there's plenty of it here. From 1902 to 1909, Sagamore Hill served as the summer White House, where T.R. conducted affairs of state. In the small library off the entrance, he hosted delegates from Russia and Japan, who resolved their conflict and secured a Nobel Peace Prize for the president. The silver candlestick whose flame melted the sealing wax on the Treaty of Portsmouth still stands on Roosevelt's desk. Up on the third floor, in the combination gun room and office, Roosevelt scribbled furiously, turning out books like African Game Trails and Progressive Principles.

A smaller house, occupied by Ted Roosevelt Jr. after his father's death and now the Old Orchard Museum, traces T.R.'s life and career in wall displays and artifacts, chief among them the uniform he wore as a Rough Rider, tailoring courtesy of Brooks Brothers.

The passion for hunting, it must be noted, cannot be missed. From the moose head in the dining room to the glowering Cape buffalo in the great hallway, Sagamore Hill bears witness to a shooting spree, often on behalf of natural history museums, that put a serious dent in the fauna of several continents. The timber wolf, the bison and the eland all experienced T.R.'s dead aim, although the giant polar bear rug in the otherwise feminine drawing room came courtesy of Robert Peary, Arctic explorer.

If simple voyeurism is the motivation, then Sagamore Hill does not disappoint. Sniff around the kitchen, the dining room, the second-floor guest bedrooms, the third-floor maids' rooms. Marvel at the lack of bathrooms. Luxuriate in the sense of solidity and permanence, the intoxicating aroma of the good life as it was lived in the United States in the late 19th century.

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The pleasures extend beyond the porch. Past the museum, a nature trail proceeds in a three-quarter-mile loop through dense woodland, with an outlet onto a salt marsh and the waters of Cold Spring Harbor. A new walkway, replacing one damaged by Hurricane Sandy, leads across the grasses and ponds, where herons pose motionless, and on to a small beach (no swimming) with a vista worthy of painter Martin Johnson Heade: sparkling waters, bobbing boats, mansions on the far shore.

The road to Sagamore from New York City is not long, but it does wind. Once off the Long Island Expressway, drivers take a country highway right into Oyster Bay, then onward, following well-placed signs, to a serpentine drive that hugs the shore before turning off onto what once was the service road to the estate.

Oyster Bay itself has charm. It has managed to retain over the decades a distinct personality, symbolized perhaps by the tiny bandstand in an equally tiny park where Roosevelt delivered speeches to his neighbors.

As it happens, one of Oyster Bay's most famous dining spots stands less than a stone's throw from the bandstand. This is Bonanza's Italian ice stand, once a pushcart from which Chick Bonanza sold ices and roasted peanuts more than a century ago. Now a hut, it offers ices in more than 100 flavors, as well as Bonanza dogs, onion rings and the like.

Oyster Bay does not lack for restaurants. Wild Honey, which once housed Roosevelt's summer offices, is the most ambitious, with a menu that includes Caribbean coconut ceviche and an Asian-spiced shrimp hot pot. For a dozen oysters, a crab cake or two and an artisanal beer or bourbon, Canterbury's Bar and Grill is a standby, cool and dark inside, with Roosevelt memorabilia on the walls. T.R.'s teeth, gleaming from the cover of Leslie's Weekly, are probably the brightest objects in the place.

There is no getting away from Theodore Roosevelt. Oyster Bay and Sagamore Hill were the places he held nearest and dearest. He died in the big house on the hill. You can see the bed where he told his wife, "I wonder if you will ever know how I love Sagamore Hill," just hours before he breathed his last, on Jan. 6, 1919. He is long gone, but the house lives on, an enticing entryway to the past, and surely the most vividly personal of the presidential shrines.

Travel on 08/23/2015