Rustic Spot Smoothed Knots of President’s Brow

WASHINGTON â€”  For a presidential retreat, the house was about as plain as a knot in a pine board, which is what it was named for. The place had no running water, electricity or telephone. Theodore Roosevelt took to it like a bird to a tree.

There were birds in profusion at Pine Knot, Roosevelt’s Virginia cottage about 100 miles and a four-hour rail journey southwest of the capital. Over three spring days in 1908 the bird-watching president and John Burroughs, the great naturalist, counted 75 individual species.

But one of the chief attractions was what the place lacked. There were simply no government officials, reporters or unexpected guests, all of whom laid claim to the president’s time at the White House.

First Lady Edith Roosevelt bought, remodeled and named Pine Knot in 1905, not long after her husband--who had become president after the assassination of William McKinley--was elected to a full four-year term in his own right.

By 1905 Edith Roosevelt had seen the White House through a redecoration that gave it the airy elegance it retains nearly a century later. Pine Knot and its 15 acres of pine and oak and wildflowers required no such fuss. The first lady bought it from local landowners for $195 and spent $85 on remodeling. She was, her husband said, “a great deal more pleased with it than any child with a toy I ever saw.�

For that matter, so was the president, who visited eight times during his remaining four years in office. “It really is a perfectly delightful little spot,� he said.

The house, about 17 miles south of Charlottesville near Keene, was two stories of unornamented clapboard, painted light yellow with olive-green shutters. There were two rooms upstairs, reachable by an open plank staircase. The large room occupying all the downstairs was flanked on each end by a large stone fireplace. There was a broad front porch supported by cedar posts on which the Roosevelts often sat and talked by starlight as the night birds sang.

“Edith Roosevelt wanted a place that met his needs for hiking, bird-watching and hunting and all the things he loved to do, and this did,� said William Harbaugh, professor of history emeritus at the University of Virginia.

Immediately before the president’s first visit in June 1905, word reached the White House that the czar of Russia had agreed to accept Roosevelt as a mediator in Russia’s disastrous war with Japan.

At Pine Knot his concerns were quite different.

“In the morning I fried bacon and eggs, while Mother boiled the kettle for tea and laid the table,� he wrote his son, Kermit. “Breakfast was most successful, and then Mother washed the dishes and did most of the work, while I did odd jobs like emptying the slops.�

The first lady had hoped Pine Knot would prove a place of “rest and repair� away from the pressures of her husband’s job. By late Sunday afternoon of that first visit, writes biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris, she “noticed that the lines had smoothed out of Theodore’s face.�

It was at Pine Knot that Roosevelt, outdoorsman and naturalist, had an encounter that, given his enthusiasm for shooting wild things, may have given him a unique and ironic place in natural history.

He may have been the last American to see a flock of now-extinct passenger pigeons in the wild.

There were no passenger pigeons in view when Burroughs visited in May 1908. He and the president climbed out of the wagon before they got to the house, “as there were a good number of warblers in the trees.�

They started counting warblers: the black-poll, the black-throated blue, Wilson’s blackcap. “He knew them in the trees overhead as quickly as I did,� Burroughs said.

One quiet evening, as Burroughs and Roosevelt read by the light of kerosene lamps and the first lady was busy with her needlework, the president’s hand “came down on the table with such a bang as made us both jump.�

“He had killed a mosquito with a blow that would almost have demolished an African lion,� Burroughs said.

Pine Knot offered much solitude but no visible security. Burroughs asked the president if he were at all concerned to be virtually alone in such an out-of-the-way spot. Roosevelt clapped his hand on his rear pocket. “I go armed and they would have to be mighty quick to get the drop on me,� he said.

Burroughs said Mrs. Roosevelt told him later that two Secret Service men were staying at a nearby farmhouse and patrolled near the cottage at night. The president had not been told, she said, “because it would irritate him.�