55.0°,
Mostly Cloudy Putting Teddy's House Back Together Again Pt. 2 "The Animal Hides"
‘Now it's your game and whoever wins the game will get one of the tigers that the Empress Dowager sent.’ ....continued below
"We played Parcheesi on Christmas, sort of a family tradition... and my stepmother said, ‘Now it's your game and whoever wins the game will get one of the tigers that the Empress Dowager sent.’ Whereupon all of our faces became contorted with greed and sharp like that, and we played madly and my sister won and then I went upstairs and I packed my bag. The next day she [her stepmother Edith] gave me the larger tiger. — Alice Longworth, from a 1974 interview
It was time to release the Siberian tiger from captivity. For three years the animal skin, a particular favorite of Theodore Roosevelt’s first child, Alice, had been packed away in a gigantic box stored flat in a climate controlled location at U.S.Art in Randolph, Mass.
During the past couple of weeks smaller items, like the animal hides, have been brought back to the house. These artifacts give the house character, providing insight into the identity of the Roosevelts, a family that has been a source of fascination for over 100 years.
Conservators hired by the National Parks Services had made all the decisions on exactly how to move the 12,000 items out of Sagamore Hill. In the case of the Siberian tiger, the experts at U.S.Art — to limit any abrasions and ensure that nothing became dislodged — had packed its eyes, ears, paws and even the tip of its tail in soft supple packing.
“If it had been rolled for three years it would have been severely damaged,” said Susan Sarna, Sagamore Hill’s curator for the past 25 years and the project manager. “There were 14 boxes made for the animal rugs.”
“We built the crates for the hides from poplar, because it has close to a neutral PH,” explained George Hagerty, projects manager for U.S.Art. “We didn’t want to use wood products that would harm the objects during the three years they were going to be stored. These crates are actually expensive because of the high quality of what was used to make them.”
“So far everything is perfect,” Hagerty said. “They [the hides] are old and tired but happy to be home.”
