Welcome to the Roosevelt Suite. This is a special feature on our self-guided audio tour, just for those who are in the Roosevelt Suite and can’t get enough local history.

This room was originally a guest room in the Cotton Mansion during this era. Hotels were much less commonplace. It was very common to host guests and have them stay with you and entertain them at your home.

So a mansion wouldn’t be complete without a space to host guests, a space to entertain, which was just down the hall here in the billiard suite.

This guest suite is named after Teddy Roosevelt, our 26th president from 1901 to 1909.

Cotton was often cited in the papers as a Roosevelt Republican. Keep in mind, this is during the period where party politics were flipped and Republicans were liberal. Democrats were Southern Democrats, and they were conservative.

Teddy Roosevelt was known as the trust buster, and yet Cotton represented Rockefeller.

Teddy had a personal connection to Joseph Cotton, and Cotton was a liberal like Roosevelt. He actually introduced Roosevelt in the 1904 presidential convention.

We framed Joseph Cotton’s 1904 speech introducing Teddy Roosevelt, along with Roosevelt’s most famous speech, The Man in the Arena.

You’ll also see a framed copy of the personal thank-you note from Roosevelt to Cotton that was sourced from the Teddy Roosevelt Archives.

Roosevelt was an impressive figure, no doubt, as carved into Mount Rushmore. Roosevelt really was a revolutionary and a giant among men.

He created the national park system. He invented the independent party. He knocked down the grip of robber barons. Early in his career, he walked the streets of Manhattan as a police chief at 5 a.m. to root out corruption in the police force.

He was well-heeled, white-collar, no doubt, but he loved adventure. He modernized the Navy and, as a colonel, became a real war hero, leading the First Cavalry, aka the Rough Riders, into the Spanish-American War.

Later in life, he had ventured to the edges of the world, discovering hundreds of miles of the then-uncharted Amazon River, which has a tributary now named after him.

He even gave a 90-minute speech in 1912 after being shot in the chest by an unsuccessful assassin.

The bullet was slowed by the pages of his speech that were tucked into his breast pocket, and he gave the bloody pages out to the first row of spectators as souvenirs.

As magnanimous as Roosevelt was, he wasn’t without sorrow and hardship. In 1884, at 25, he lost his mother and his wife, both on the same day, Valentine’s Day. He was devastated.

He resigned and went for two years to the frontier in the Dakota Territory. He lived as a frontiersman, not concerned with life or death. His sense of adventure became his hallmark, known as a hunter and a woodsman.

He was once on a political campaign where a bear was captured for him to shoot. He refused to shoot this captive bear, and several papers characterized him as a teddy bear.

Theodore had mercy on the bear and took the opportunity to spin the narrative. That year, in 1904, he had little brown toy bears made as campaign gifts, and he put little bears on his campaign buttons.

This is where the first toy teddy bear came from. It was his 1904 campaign.

We have three original Teddy Bear Roosevelt campaign buttons framed on the wall by the bathroom.

If you’d like to learn more about the Cotton Mansion, the Cotton family, and early-1900s Duluth history, consider following the main self-guided audio tour. There are 12 stops that take you from top to bottom through all the common rooms, and it starts with the QR code on the console in the main-floor foyer.