The day his young wife and mother died, Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his diary that “the light has gone out of my life.”

Roosevelt restored his spirit only through the extended trips he took to the isolated Dakota Territory, roaming the Badlands, hunting big game and raising cattle. He later said the Badlands was where “the romance of my life began.”

A library examining the country’s 26th president will open next summer in the North Dakota landscape remarkably similar to what Roosevelt would have experienced – far from any city and surrounded by rugged hills beneath a vast sky.

The nearly 100,000-square-foot facility near Medora, North Dakota, is planned to open July 4, 2026, America's 250th anniversary. All living presidents have been invited.

The library rises from the flat, grassy top of a butte across a highway from Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

A path leads onto the library's sloping roof planted with grasses and flowers. Inside, enormous rammed-earth walls of layered colors represent the dramatic Badlands.

But the isolation that was so appealing to Roosevelt remains today and it raises a question: How many people will visit a museum so distant from the rest of America?