Suffolk County has decided that the best way to tell Theodore Roosevelt's Long Island story is the way he experienced it: as one long ride east. At a press event Monday at Meadow Croft in Sayville, County Executive Ed Romaine and other officials announced plans for a Theodore Roosevelt Historic Tourism Trail, a roughly 80-mile route running from the president's home ground in Oyster Bay, across the South Shore, all the way to the bluffs at Montauk.

The date was not an accident. Monday was September 14, exactly 125 years after Roosevelt took the oath of office in 1901 following the assassination of President William McKinley, becoming, at 42, the youngest president in American history. He remains the only president who made his adult home on Long Island. A Roosevelt impersonator handled part of the program, arguing that history absorbed in place beats history absorbed in a classroom.

The route he actually rode

The trail is planned along a route Roosevelt genuinely traveled. From Sagamore Hill, his hilltop home in Oyster Bay, he would ride on horseback to Meadow Croft, the Sayville estate of his cousin John E. Roosevelt, and from there the route runs east to Montauk, where his Rough Riders came ashore in 1898. The county intends to place signs along the path carrying historical facts, so a driver, cyclist or rider following it picks up the story mile by mile.

The project is still in its planning phase. Romaine said the county has not yet put a cost figure on it, and no completion date has been committed to publicly. What exists today is the route, the intent and three anchors that are already open to anyone.

Three stops that already exist

The western anchor is Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, now a National Historic Site run by the National Park Service. Roosevelt lived there from 1885 until his death in 1919, and during his two terms the house functioned as the Summer White House, with the business of the country conducted from the North Shore.

The midpoint is Meadow Croft, the reason Monday's announcement happened in Sayville. The estate sits on a broad tract between the branches of Browns Creek where it opens into the Great South Bay. Its main house, a Colonial Revival block designed by local architect Isaac H. Green in 1891 and 1892, was grafted onto a mid-1800s farmhouse, and the grounds still hold the stable, coach house and an early poured-concrete swimming pool. The county owns it now, it is dedicated to the Suffolk County Historic Trust, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Bayport Heritage Association opens the main house for tours on Saturday and Sunday afternoons from spring through fall, which means the middle of the Roosevelt trail can be visited this weekend.

The eastern anchor is the land inside today's Montauk County Park. That is where Camp Wikoff stood in 1898, the encampment where Roosevelt and the Rough Riders recuperated in quarantine after the Spanish-American War and the fight at San Juan Hill. The park still holds Third House, the 18th-century cattle keepers' residence Roosevelt used, and it borders Deep Hollow Ranch, which dates to 1658 and calls itself the oldest cattle ranch in the country. You can ride a horse to the beach there today, which is about as close as Long Island gets to time travel.

Not the same trail as the Greenway

Long Island now has two Montauk-bound trail projects moving at once, and they are different animals. The Long Island Greenway, which began construction this year, is a physical walking and biking path being built segment by segment from the Queens line east. The Roosevelt trail is a heritage route: a signed path through existing roads, parks and historic sites, built around places to stop rather than pavement to lay. One is infrastructure. The other is a story told at driving and riding speed.

Suffolk has been leaning into its history all year as the country's 250th anniversary approaches, and the Roosevelt announcement fits a county that has been staging events at its historic sites through the fall. Meadow Croft itself has weekend programming running through October.

What it means if you live here

For now, nothing changes on the ground: no signs are up, no map has been published, and the county has not said when either will arrive. But the three anchors of the future trail are all open now, and together they make a legitimate day trip that most Long Islanders have never strung together: the president's house in Oyster Bay in the morning, his cousin's estate on the Great South Bay in the afternoon, and, if you are ambitious, the land where the Rough Riders camped by evening. When the signs eventually go in, the drive will come with its history attached. Until then, the route is already there, the way it has been since Roosevelt rode it.