Suffolk to blaze new trail honoring Theodore Roosevelt's county connection

Teddy Roosevelt greatly expanded the national parks, led the Rough Riders to victory in Cuba, and overcame potentially devastating childhood asthma to become a vigorous outdoorsman who hiked mountains and explored the Amazon.

But what many people don’t know about the former president whose face is on Mount Rushmore is that he had a connection to the South Shore of Long Island, especially Sayville.

On Monday, officials unveiled a plan to create a Theodore Roosevelt trail on Long Island that will include not just Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay — Roosevelt’s "summer White House" — but spots such as Meadow Croft estate in Sayville, home to a sprawling yellow house that was owned by one of Roosevelt’s cousins, John E. Roosevelt.

 It was also the site of a visit by the president in 1903 that attracted so many locals it made the Secret Service nervous, said George Munkenbeck, the Islip Town historian.

"Everybody focuses everything on Oyster Bay not realizing that there’s a tremendous amount of Roosevelt history here" on the South Shore, Munkenbeck said. "There is a lot of Theodore Roosevelt right here on these grounds."

Besides Meadow Croft and Sagamore Hill, the trail may include Montauk Point, where Roosevelt and more than 1,000 Rough Riders stayed in Camp Wikoff, a large tent encampment where they were quarantined to recover from tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever that they contracted in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

A smaller number of the soldiers also stayed in a hospital in East Islip, Munkenbeck said. The hospital is no longer there, but the site may be marked as part of the trail, he said. Organizers may also mount a reenactment of the Rough Riders at Islip Grange in Sayville, he said.

On Monday, to mark the kickoff of the planned trail, a Teddy Roosevelt impersonator rode in a Ford Model A onto the grounds of Meadow Croft to  give  a speech to a crowd assembled on the grass.

The event marked the 125th anniversary of the day Roosevelt, then the vice president, was suddenly thrust into the presidency in 1901 when President William McKinley died eight days after an assassin shot him in Buffalo.

Roosevelt was hiking Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks, the highest peak in New York State, when he got the news McKinley was shot. He became the youngest U.S. president ever at 42.

 Roosevelt himself was shot in 1912 at the start of a political speech, but kept talking for as long as 90 minutes, according to historians. He famously told the crowd, "Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose."  

Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine, whose administration is spearheading creation of the Roosevelt trail, told the crowd on Monday, "It’s great that we are gathering today to remember the only president from Long Island." 

Roosevelt, he said, "was an unusual individual" who "gave us an example of what leadership looked like."

The trail should be ready for hikers and history buffs by early next year, county spokesman Michael Martino said.

Bill Sommer, a retired law enforcement officer who played the role of Roosevelt, said he hopes the trail will help give school children a better appreciation of history.

"I can’t just sit in a classroom and read it and absorb it," he said. "I’d rather be here."