Ethel Roosevelt, TR's other daughter, led the charge to save Sagamore Hill

The story has been passed down through several generations of staff and volunteers at Sagamore Hill. Brian Tadler, vice president of the Friends of Sagamore Hill, said he heard it from a now-retired National Park Service ranger.

In the 1960s, soon after former President Theodore Roosevelt’s Cove Neck mansion opened to the public, an elegant older docent impressed visitors with her command of the Roosevelt family home.

“Afterwards, a few of the people on the tour approached her and said, ‘Wow, that was incredible, you know so much about this house,’ ” Tadler said.

Her response: “Well I should know, I used to live here,” he said, relaying the anecdote.

The visitors were shocked to find she was none other than Ethel Roosevelt Derby, one of the 26th president’s six children.

It wasn’t the first — or last — time Ethel slid under the public’s Roosevelt radar: Born in 1891, she was the third of Teddy Roosevelt’s five children with Edith Kermit Carow, and she lived until 1977. Ethel had a half-sister from TR’s first marriage — Alice Roosevelt Longworth — as well as her four brothers, Theodore Jr., Kermit, Archibald and Quentin.

Quentin was an airman shot down and killed during the First World War. Ted Jr. was a general who led American troops ashore at Utah Beach in World War II. Kermit and Archie also compiled distinguished military records. And Alice was a writer and Washington wit, known for her sharp commentary, her social life and other exploits.

Given the towering profiles of her siblings and larger-than-life father, it’s perhaps not a surprise that Ethel — who married Richard Derby, a surgeon at Glen Cove Community Hospital, and lived most of her life in Oyster Bay — has often been overlooked. Historian Natalie Naylor calls that a mistake. “She deserves to be much better known,” said Naylor, emeritus professor at Hofstra University in Hempstead. While her siblings made their marks on the battlefields of France or in the parlors of Georgetown, Naylor said, “Ethel was the one with the most significance to Long Island.”

A NURSE IN WORLD WAR I

Naylor said scholars often downplay Ethel’s significance, which she thinks slights her activities as a civic activist and preserver of the family legacy. “Too often Ethel Roosevelt Derby is mentioned in Roosevelt biographies and histories primarily as a child or relegating her as an adult to the traditional women’s domestic role as wife and mother,” Naylor said.

This domestic stereotype overlooked Ethel’s involvement in a wide range of public issues and charitable organizations, starting during the First World War, when she went to France with her husband as a volunteer nurse. After her overseas service, Ethel returned to Oyster Bay. She and Richard moved into an 1878 Queen Anne-style home on Lexington Avenue, although she made frequent trips to her nearby childhood home of Sagamore Hill.

Tweed Roosevelt, TR’s great-grandson, remembers vividly his visits with the woman he called “Auntie Ethel.” He was a graduate student at Columbia University in Manhattan in the 1960s, and would spend weekends at her house in Oyster Bay. “You felt like you were at home as soon as you walked in the door,” recalled Tweed, chair of the Theodore Roosevelt Institute at Long Island University in Brookville. “She was warm, she listened to you, she was extremely approachable.” Among Tweed’s generation — the grandchildren of Teddy’s children — “she was everybody’s favorite aunt.”

Tweed, 84, of Boston, said he also believes Ethel has been miscast in the Roosevelt saga. “She’s been dismissed as a sort of nonentity,” he said. “Totally untrue. She didn’t push herself forward or take up the cudgels and flags like her brothers. She was not like Alice who was out in front all the time, and who wanted to be in the papers. She went about her business and she was effective.”

‘FRANK FRIENDLINESS’

Newspapers were interested in her, at least when her father was in the White House, from 1901 to 1909. The Brooklyn Eagle in 1908 devoted a full page to profiling the then-teenaged Ethel, describing her as “a tall blonde girl with … simple gravity of manner and frank friendliness of greeting.”

As an adult, Ethel juggled her duties as a parent (she and Richard had four children) with an interest in issues, both national and local. While remaining loyal to her father’s Republican Party, she supported the Civil Rights movement. “She was very committed to racial justice,” said historian Rachel Lane, of Wilmington, North Carolina, who is writing a biography of Ethel. “She was just as strident as her cousin Eleanor Roosevelt in terms of how she felt about this issue.”

Locally, that commitment was demonstrated in Ethel’s crusade for what we would now call affordable housing in Oyster Bay. “Ethel Roosevelt helped transform and create housing accommodations for the African-American population in the hamlet of Oyster Bay,” said Denice Sheppard, director of the Oyster Bay Historical Society. Ethel encouraged voter registration among the Black domestic workers in Oyster Bay in the 1940s, many of whom had recently migrated from rural parts of Virginia. As a result of Ethel’s efforts, Sheppard said, “the majority of the newly arrived African-Americans in the hamlet registered as Republican” and were able to vote (some for the first time in their lives).

Ethel also remained involved with the Red Cross, served on the board of the American Museum of Natural History and supported a range of charitable organizations, locally and nationally — among them Christ Church in Oyster Bay, where she was a regular congregant, and the Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary and Audubon Center.

Perhaps her most lasting legacy, however, is the preservation of the home she grew up in. “More than anyone else, she’s responsible for saving Sagamore Hill for the public,” Naylor said.

SAVING SAGAMORE HILL

After her mother, Edith, died in 1948, a local organization called the Roosevelt Memorial Association bought the house and — with Ethel’s encouragement — undertook a major restoration, seeking to bring it back to the way it had looked during the years it was TR’s “summer White House.” While her surviving siblings — Archie and Alice — were also consulted, it was Ethel who was most involved in this preservation effort, helping to mobilize support and address community concerns. But she believed something larger was at stake than increased traffic on Cove Road. “I feel that we would be establishing something of permanent value for the American people,” she wrote in a letter to her daughter.

While the refurbished mansion began to receive visitors in the 1950s, the cost of maintaining it became too great for the association. In 1962, by an act of Congress, Sagamore Hill became a National Historic Site under the administration of the National Park Service, a designation that provided funding for maintenance, restoration and preservation.

Saving her childhood home was clearly an important issue for Ethel. Former Republican National Committee chairman and Long Island congressman Leonard Hall, a close friend of Ethel’s, spoke to her tenacity, referencing her father’s famous charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War. “The lady who led the charge up Sagamore Hill was Ethel Derby,” Hall said. “ ‘No’ was not in her vocabulary.”

A READER, A TRAVELER

Ethel remained closely connected to her large, extended family her entire life. “She was not a grande dame,” said another descendant, Sandy Roosevelt Dworkin, who lives in Baltimore. “She was approachable, accessible.” Dworkin, like her cousin Tweed Roosevelt, has fond memories of visiting Ethel. “We’d have lunch with her, and then we would go into the living room and she’d pick a book off the shelves and read a passage aloud,” said Dworkin, who recalls Rudyard Kipling and G.K. Chesterton as being two of her great-aunt’s favorite authors.

The daughter of a man who famously extolled what he called “The Strenuous Life” was not one to be curled up on the sofa with a book all day: According to historian Betty Boyd Caroli, when Ethel was in her 70s, she went to Peru to hike the mountainous trails of Machu Picchu. She also traveled to Kashmir, where she stayed on a houseboat.

Ethel Roosevelt Derby died Dec. 10, 1977 at age 86. Even then, Alice managed to steal some of the spotlight, as Ethel’s New York Times obituary devoted nearly as much space to her half-sister as to Ethel. “Mrs. Derby was the opposite in temperament from her half-sister, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who alternated between defiance of her father — smoking, betting, riding on the running boards of cars and moving with the ‘fast’ crowd — and an almost doting loyalty,” The Times wrote. By contrast, Ethel “preferred not to seek the limelight.”

In Ethel’s Washington Post obituary, she was given more credit for her civic involvement. “If there was any local activity of any kind, she either started it or was in it,” her longtime friend Leonard Hall was quoted as saying.

When Sagamore Hill opened, Ethel was indeed one of those who guided visitors through the corridors of the home she had grown up in. “Sometimes she would introduce herself at the start of the tour and sometimes, like in that story, she wouldn’t,” Tadler said. “Which says to me that she also had a sense of humor.”