But above all there will be the house, open for business and revitalized, an enticing day trip for history buffs, nature lovers or real estate voyeurs. Visitors, who may tour only the first floor on opening day, will see few big changes. One of the great virtues of Sagamore Hill is that it stayed in family hands from the time it was built in 1886 until the 1950s, when the nonprofit Theodore Roosevelt Association took it over. In 1963, the association presented the house, and the 83 acres surrounding it, to the American people, and the Park Service has managed it ever since.

With so few owners, the house has remained more or less intact. Its 23 rooms retain their original furnishings and knickknacks and the profusion of stuffed animal heads, bear rugs, weird furniture and miles of books that Roosevelt amassed and displayed with no particular sense of order or design. It is an exuberant, extroverted house. It is most emphatically a family house, a place where children ran wild and Roosevelt, in some ways an overgrown child himself, expressed every facet of his outsize personality. For house snoopers, it is a trove. There is a lot to look at.