Stolen 37 Years Ago, Theodore Roosevelt’s Watch Finally Returns Home

The watch, which was stolen in 1987, was returned Thursday to Sagamore Hill National Historic Site on Long Island.

Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite pocket watch, which he carried around the world and wore in the White House, was returned Thursday to the president’s former home on Long Island decades after it was stolen from a mansion in Buffalo.

The watch itself is “fairly pedestrian,” with an “inexpensive coin silver case,” the F.B.I. said in a news release. But its historical value is significant. The watch accompanied Roosevelt in 1898 as he led the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, nicknamed the Rough Riders, at San Juan Hill and other battles in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, the military campaign that made him famous, according to the National Park Service, which owns the timepiece. It traveled with him down the Amazon River, across Africa and during his administrations as New York’s governor and the nation’s 26th president.

It was a present from Roosevelt’s sister, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, and he cherished it.

“You could not have given me a more useful present than the watch; it was exactly what I wished,” he wrote in a letter to her.

Tweed Roosevelt, Teddy’s great-grandson, learned about the watch this Tuesday, when the Park Service contacted him about its recovery, he said. When he realized the former president had carried the watch for decades, and had sent it to be fixed while recuperating from a disastrous trip on the Amazon, in 1913, Mr. Roosevelt said, the object’s importance to his ancestor became clear.

“It’s probably the only thing that he carried consistently throughout his life,” said Tweed Roosevelt, 82. “Obviously its sentimental value was tremendous.”