Theodore Roosevelt’s historic pocket watch returns home 37 years after it went missing

A pocket watch that belonged to President Theodore Roosevelt has been returned to its home after it was stolen from an exhibit nearly four decades ago.

According to a news release from the FBI, the timepiece belonging to the nation’s 26th president was returned on Thursday to the site of Roosevelt’s home, Sagamore Hill National Historic Site in Oyster Bay, New York.

The watch had been given to Roosevelt in 1898 by his youngest sister, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, and his brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson Jr., according to the FBI. He received the watch shortly before departing to Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

The inscription reads, in all capital letters, “Theodore Roosevelt from D.R. & C.R.”

“This watch was a fairly pedestrian Waltham 17 jewel watch with an inexpensive coin silver case. It’s a ‘Riverside’ grade and model ‘1888′ with a hunter-style case, meaning it has a lid on either side which fold and encase the dial and the movement,” Special Agent Robert Giczy, a member of the FBI Art Crime Team who investigated the provenance of the watch, said in a statement.

After Roosevelt died in 1919, the watch became the property of Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, The New York Times reported. The National Park Service, which maintains the site, lent the item to the Wilcox Mansion in Buffalo, New York, in 1971. The building was where Roosevelt was sworn in as president after the September 1901 assassination of William McKinley, according to the newspaper.

It was displayed in an unlocked case and was stolen on July 21, 1987, according to The Buffalo News.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Leslie G. Foschio, who was president of the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site Foundation’s board of trustees in 1987, told the newspaper that security had not been a concern at the time.

“The idea that we needed security was not a priority,” Foschio said. “We’d never had a problem.”

In 2023, the watch appeared in an auction run by Blackwell Auctions of Clearwater, Florida, the newspaper reported. Edwin Bailey, the owner of the auction house, verified the watch’s authenticity and listed it for sale in May 2023.

In a 2023 interview with the News, Bailey declined to say who had given him the watch or who owned it. He could not be reached Thursday for comment, the Times reported.

Bailey pulled the item off the auction block and contacted the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, according to the newspaper.

It was returned to the site during a ceremony in New York on Thursday.

Tweed Roosevelt, the president’s 82-year-old great-grandson, learned about the watch’s recovery on Tuesday, the Times reported.

“It’s probably the only thing that he carried consistently throughout his life,” Tweed Roosevelt told the newspaper. “Obviously its sentimental value was tremendous.”

Bailey estimated that the pocket watch might have fetched up to $500,000 in an auction, but said he was glad to return the timepiece.

“It was an enormous honor to handle a national treasure,” he told the News.

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