Georgia Ann Wolf prepares to place numbers on pieces from the The Roosevelt Room at the Hermione Museum in Tallulah. The numbers will be keyed to written descriptions.(Jon Giffin The Vicksburg Post)

[4/26/04]TALLULAH A great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt will help open an exhibit here on the hunt that resulted in the president’s successful hunt for a Delta bear.

The Roosevelt Room will open Saturday in the Madison Historical Society’s Hermione Museum, 315 N. Mulberry St.

Tweed Roosevelt, a great-grandson of the adventurer and naturalist who also served as president, is to speak at a banquet in his honor at the Tallulah Civic Center Friday.

The museum’s director, Geneva Williams, said knowledge of the hunt, which happened in 1907, has circulated mainly through storytelling.

“Everybody who has lived here, it’s just common knowledge,” Williams said.

The creation of the exhibit, though, marks a culmination of the first major effort to document the event for visitors, Williams said.

The exhibit will include 20 photographs on two-year loan from Harvard University and up to about 13 previously unpublished photographs of the hunt from local sources.

The hunt followed by five years Roosevelt’s more-famous bear-hunting trip in Mississippi, which took place in Sharkey County in November 1902. On that hunt a black bear was knocked out and tied up for Roosevelt to kill, but he declined to do so since it would have been unsportsmanlike.

That decision inspired a political cartoon that led to the marketing of a line of stuffed toy bears as Teddy Bears. Since then, almost all stuffed bears are known as teddies.

Less known is that Roosevelt returned to the Louisiana Delta in October 1907, and he and his group hunted without success for several days before moving south to Bear Lake, part of an old river bed. There, with two days left on his two-week trip, he did kill a black bear with a shot from about 20 yards away. The bear was killed on the north end of Bear Lake at Morgan Sawmill Ridge, where a monument stands today.

The president wrote an article about the hunt that was published in Scribner’s Magazine.

“I was especially anxious to kill a bear in these canebrakes after the fashion of the old Southern planters, who for a century past have followed the bear with horse and hound and horn in Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas,” he wrote.

The Roosevelt photographs, some of which are of the hunt itself, will hang on the walls of the museum’s central room. Other items will also be on display.

The hunting party was camped near the Bear Lake Hunting and Fishing Club, which operated from 1899 until around the mid-1940s or later, Williams said. The club was the first conservation club in Louisiana, she added.

“These hunters realized that if they didn’t preserve game, there wouldn’t be anything left,” she said, adding that the club imposed hunting limits before the state government did.

Roosevelt placed great emphasis on the conservation of natural resources, and his great-grandson is expected to speak April 30 on similar issues. Tweed Roosevelt will also speak on the origin of the Teddy Bear and the president’s Madison Parish hunt, a press release announcing the event said.

Tweed Roosevelt is the president of The Roosevelt Investment Group of New York City and Boston.

The day of the banquet he is also scheduled to speak at the museum to fourth- and fifth-graders of Tallulah and Wright elementary schools, Williams said.

The exhibit will open at 10 a.m. on Saturday, May 1.

The museum’s regular hours are 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. Admission is free.

The museum also includes two other rooms of local-history exhibits.

The Roosevelt Room will be a permanent part of the museum, Williams said.

“It’s an important part of our history,” she said.

Interest in Roosevelt and his hunts has been raised recently with events surrounding 2002’s centennial of Roosevelt’s Mississippi hunt.

A permanent exhibit in the fine arts room of the public library in Rolling Fork now documents that hunt for visitors to the Sharkey County seat.

The same guide who led that hunt, Holt Collier, also led Roosevelt’s 1907 hunt. Collier was an experienced hunter who was born a slave in Mississippi. Roosevelt wrote that Collier “killed or assisted in killing over 3,000 bears.”

The Hermione Museum itself is a house built in 1855 that was used as a hospital by forces under the command of Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. The house is one of four Madison Parish structures still standing that were built before the Civil War, museum literature says.

It originally stood near Milliken’s Bend, the site of a battle in Grant’s campaign for Vicksburg. In 1997 it was donated to the historical society and moved to downtown Tallulah, where it stands today.

Louisiana Black Bear have been on the endangered species list, but are making a comeback as habitat is restored or maintained in both the Tensas Wildlife Refuge south of Tallulah and Delta National Forest north of Vicksburg.