26. Theodore Roosevelt
The son of a wealthy New York City businessman and philanthropist, Theodore Roosevelt was born October 27, 1858, in the Roosevelts’ Manhattan home. During the Civil War, Roosevelt’s father worked to alleviate the financial strain on the families of Union soldiers, while Roosevelt’s Georgia-born mother arranged smuggled goods to relieve friends in the Confederacy. Roosevelt suffered from asthma and general poor health throughout his childhood, and he took to regular exercise to counteract his frailty. He was also an avid reader with an abiding interest in natural history, zoology, and adventure. The Roosevelts toured Europe, the Holy Land, and Egypt when Roosevelt was a youth, and he studied for a period in Germany. In 1876, he enrolled at Harvard. Roosevelt’s brownstone birth home was destroyed in 1916, but a replica was quickly rebuilt and now serves as the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site.
Photographing the Wilson site was a quick foray into New York City one early morning before the traffic got too bad. Andy and I found metered parking near the site, got out and photographed, and were back in the car and off of Manhattan in about an hour. The filtered light perfectly illuminated the early morning dew on the shiny brass railings and doorknobs of the reproduction brownstone. While New York has changed considerably since the 1850s, the urban environment is a stark contrast to the more rural locations of previous presidents. In college, I had a postcard image of Roosevelt and John Muir standing high in the Sierras with Yosemite valley in the background. Their 3-night camping trip together would foreshadow Roosevelt's conservation efforts and begin the National Parks system in earnest.