Teddy Roosevelt’s watch, stolen in 1987, turns up at Florida auction house
Everyone told Edwin Bailey that the pocket watch engraved with President Theodore Roosevelt’s name was a fake. But hundreds of hours of research convinced him it was the real deal, and the Florida auctioneer decided to sell it at a March 18, 2023, auction.
In the lead-up, a group of five well-dressed people came to his shop in Clearwater, Fla., wanting to inspect what Blackwell Auctions was describing online as possibly “the most historically significant item we’ve ever handled.” Bailey, now 58, was excited, figuring that a prospective buyer was so interested that they had sent a team of experts to examine it.
But after Bailey set the watch on a velvet-lined jewelry tray and put the starting bid at $50,000, one in the group told him that they were federal agents with the National Park Service and the FBI and then handed him a document.
“And this is a federal warrant authorizing the seizure of this watch and of all materials you have that are associated with it,” Bailey remembered the agent saying in a blog post he published Saturday.
On Thursday, officials returned the artifact to Roosevelt’s family home at Sagamore Hill National Historic Site in Oyster Bay, N.Y., on Long Island. Sagamore had owned and displayed the watch since his death in 1919. But a thief stole the watch in 1987 while it was being loaned to another historic site associated with the 26th president, and it fell off the radar for more than 35 years until Bailey started advertising his auction online. That led agents from the National Park Service and the FBI to start investigating and, eventually, to show up at Bailey’s auction house.
“It is an honor to have a role in preserving American history for current and future generations to learn from,” National Park Service Director Chuck Sams said last week in a news release. “Recovering and returning this remarkable piece of presidential history, a cherished personal item of President Theodore Roosevelt, to its rightful home here at Sagamore Hill reflects the dedication and hard work of NPS and partners in the spirit of preservation.”
‘It’s a fake’
Months before agents showed up at Blackwell Auctions in early March 2023, Bailey was perusing dozens of watches owned by a retired collector with whom he’d built a good working relationship, Bailey wrote. In one of the collector’s shoe boxes, Bailey noticed something carefully wrapped in cloth and asked about it. The collector unwrapped a nondescript silver pocket watch, an American Waltham that Bailey thought might be worth $100.
Then he noticed the inscription on the inside of the coin silver case: THEODORE ROOSEVELT and D.R. & C.R.R. Bailey would soon discover that the two monograms referred to the former president’s brother-in-law and his sister, Douglas Robinson and Corinne Roosevelt Robinson.
The collector told Bailey how he’d come into possession of the watch: He had run a jewelry business in New York in the late 1980s, and a local antique hunter he’d befriended would occasionally borrow money and leave the pocket watch as collateral until he paid back the debt. He did this several times over the years until he died while using the watch as collateral, effectively bequeathing it to the collector, who kept it for the next 35 years.
That entire time, the collector assumed the watch was a fake. Bailey did, too, but nevertheless asked whether he could research its history and sell it on the collector’s behalf if it turned out to be genuine. The collector eventually agreed.
Bailey spent hundreds of hours over the next few months investigating, he said in his blog post. He found some 400 letters Roosevelt wrote to his sister, poring over the “semi-legible cursive” until stumbling on one addressed May 5, 1898, while Roosevelt was in San Antonio and about to travel to Cuba.
“Darling Corinne, You could not have given me a more useful present than the watch; it was exactly what I wished … Thank old Douglas for the watch - and for his many, many kindnesses.”
That spurred Bailey and the watch’s owner. Bailey spent the next few weeks consumed with more research, writing to several organizations and museums tied to Roosevelt. At one point, he contacted an appraiser and Americana expert, offering to ship him the watch and pay him to examine it. The response was deflating.
“Save your money,” Bailey recalled the expert saying. “It’s a fake.”
The expert’s opinion was not a unique one. Bailey spoke with several colleagues, all with decades of experience in antiques or watches, and all of them told him it was a forgery or reproduction. There was no way Roosevelt’s pocket watch was not in a museum but had instead found its way to a small auction house in southwestern Florida.
Bailey was discouraged but kept digging. Part of his investigation was examining the service marks jewelers had left inside the watch’s case. He found “S.R. 4/16,” which, based on jewelers’ practices, suggested that someone with the initials S.R. had repaired the watch in April 1916. Bailey combined that discovery with a passage he found while reading Roosevelt’s 1914 memoir “Through the Brazilian Wilderness” that he wrote after failing to win a third term in 1912. In the travelogue, the former president recounts a particularly difficult bayou crossing: “One result of the swim, by the way, was that my watch, a veteran of Cuba and Africa, came to an indignant halt.”
Everything Bailey had uncovered about the watch - the name, lettering, patina, serial number range, the documentation - didn’t amount to proof, but it all added up to what he believed was a convincing case of its authenticity. He made that case to the owner, who agreed to let him offer it up at auction.
“Now it was up to the bidders. Would they believe the evidence I’d gathered? Was it enough?” Bailey wrote.
‘A national treasure’
Bidders never got the chance before the federal agents showed up with their warrant to take the watch and all of Bailey’s research and materials. During the visit, the agents asked him about what he’d learned about the watch.
A few minutes into the interview, a realization washed over Bailey, leading him to put his hands on either side of his face. An agent asked if he was all right. Bailey responded by smiling, laughing, tearing up and, since he was “downright giddy” while being interrogated by federal agents, looking “like a lunatic.” The agent once again asked if Bailey was okay.
“I was right!” Bailey blurted out to them. “Nobody I talked with - I mean nobody - believed this watch was Roosevelt’s. But I knew I was right!”
The agents smiled, according to Bailey. The lead agent set the watch down onto the velvet-lined tray and leaned forward.
“Can you see my hands shaking?” he recalled her asking. “Yeah, you were right. This was Roosevelt’s pocket watch.”
Bailey learned at least some of the backstory about how he had ended up with it. It was then that he found out that the watch was stolen in 1987 while on loan from the National Park Service to the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site, a museum in Buffalo dedicated to the man who served as president from 1901 to 1909. Bailey said that it was nabbed from an unlocked display cabinet and that the identity of the thief remains a mystery, at least publicly. He said the consignor who had the watch for more than 30 years was never a suspect.
Bailey said he knows he didn’t recover an artifact akin to the Ark of the Covenant. And because the watch had been stolen and was seized by federal agents, his hundreds of hours of work never led to the payoff he expected by selling it at auction. He thought it could sell for as much as a half-million dollars.
“It could have gone anywhere,” he told The Washington Post.
If it had fetched $500,000, Bailey said he would have earned around $85,000. He admitted “it did suck putting that much into something for absolutely zero return, but it was kind of exiting being a part of that,” he said during the interview.
“I got to play a role - however peripheral - in the recovery of a national treasure,” he wrote in the blog post. “I had the privilege of handling and researching arguably the most valued personal item carried by one of the four guys on Mount Rushmore.”
“And,” he added, “that’s enough for me.”