Tell Your FriendsTop of the World
A golden toy commemorating the Gateway to the West finds a home in the East with the son of the doting Teddy Roosevelt.
By Anita Slomski, Parks Magazine
Theodore Roosevelt was famous for giving things away. When the 26th president was presented with a gold spinning top at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition—also known as the St. Louis World’s Fair—in 1903, he knew how delighted his six-year-old son, Quentin, would be to have it. “I am very homesick for Mother and you children,” he wrote in a letter to “Quenty-Quee” from Del Monte, Calif., on May 10, 1903, adding, “I have a gold top, which I shall give you if Mother thinks you can take care of it.”
A replica of the globe, the top has a ruby marking the North Pole and a diamond set over St. Louis. “It was a pretty flossy item even for a giveaway to a president,” says Amy Verone, chief of cultural resources at the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, which displays the top at the Roosevelts’ Long Island home with other souvenirs from TR’s travels.
It’s likely Quentin laid claim to the top even if he never spun it, because the toy never left Sagamore Hill. After Quentin was killed in France at age 20 in 1918, his grieving mother kept all of his possessions close to her. She tucked two dozen of his letters into books they had read together from the 5,000 volumes in the family’s library.
This artile appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Parks Magazine.
Photo: Holly Henderson
