On July 4th, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the founding of our country, the Theodore Roosevelt Library will open in Medora, North Dakota. Although I can’t be there in person, I will be there in spirit as it’s the best way I can imagine to celebrate all about my country that I love.
One would have thought that New York City or Long Island or Albany might have been the more appropriate site for a library dedicated to the 26th president, but North Dakota represents a significant time and turning point in Roosevelt’s life. In 1886, TR traveled to the Badlands to recover from the deaths of both his wife and his mother on Valentines Day on two different floors in the same New York City brownstone. He left his newborn daughter Alice, with his sister Anna, and fled to the west where he threw himself into living the strenuous life of a rancher in order to forget and to heal. Although his ranching ventures eventually failed, he always connected his interest in conservation and his willingness to return to public life with the time he spent out west.
The design of the library set in the middle of the prairie grasslands reflects so many of President Roosevelt’s ideas about the environment and his love of this particular landscape. As the website reads, “the main building’s gently sloping roof looks to the northeast, gazing out to the National Park, historical settings in the Little Missouri River valley, and the Elkhorn Ranch far in the distance, further connecting the Library of tomorrow with its origins from the past.”
I have a special connection to this project as I’ll be donating my great grandmother’s silver tea set to the Library for one of their exhibits. Corinne Roosevelt Robinson was Theodore’s adoring younger sister and my grandmother’s mother. I inherited her tea set when my mother died and for years, it’s been stored in the back of a hall closet wrapped in protective clothing. I had no occasion grand enough to bring it out and the elaborate design requires a great deal of scrubbing with a toothbrush to keep its shine.
I was delighted that the Library was eager to acquire it as I could think of no better place for it to reside.
My family has a tradition of relying on one’s own individual efforts and not on any famous relatives. I admit that my uncle who was chairman of the Republican Party in Connecticut reached out to his counterpart, Senator Abe Ribicoff (D) to help me get a summer job in his Congressional office. I expect that my last name, Alsop, helped me to land a job as a summer reporter for the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Massachusetts as the Miller brothers who owned the paper had heard of the Alsop brothers, esteemed Washington columnists. But I wanted to make it on my own as a writer which is why, until my recent memoir Daughter of Spies, I wrote my fiction under Winthrop which was my middle name and is now my legal name. (It came to me from my great grandmother, Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, as I was born on the same day 101 years later. Some ancestor kept meticulous records in a family bible.)
So I wasn’t aware that our family was related to Theodore Roosevelt until I was in college. I must have really kept my head in the sand as, for a number of years, I had tea every Thursday afternoon with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the president’s oldest daughter, the one he’d abandoned at birth to flee west. I knew her as Mrs. L or Cousin Alice and went to school with her granddaughter, but with the self-centered focus of a young girl, I didn’t make the connection.
I am delighted that my esteemed relative is finally being honored in an appropriate way. As flawed a man as he was (and aren’t we all?), his willingness to stand up to big business, his pressure on Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Meat Inspection Act and to create the U.S. Forest Service, his mediation to end the Russo-Japanese war and his setting aside of 194 million acres for conservation—these achievements alone among many more, point to a man of conviction and integrity, one who deserves to be honored with this very special memorial.
Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop (www.elizabethwinthropalsop.com) is the author of over 50 works of fiction for adults and children under the pen name Elizabeth Winthrop. These include the award-winning fantasy series, The Castle in the Attic and The Battle for the Castle as well as the short story, The Golden Darters, read on the nationwide radio program, Selected Shorts, and included in Best American Short Story anthology, and Island Justice and In My Mother’s House, two novels now available as eBooks. She is the daughter of the acclaimed journalist, Stewart Alsop. Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies, a family history about her parents’ love affair during World War II and their marriage lived in the spotlight of Washington during the 1950s was published by Regal House, October 25, 2022.
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