Oyster Bay's Fallen: Including a President's Son
Near Jones Beach, New York
Oyster Bay, Long Island was the home of Theodore Roosevelt, whose estate was at Sagamore Hill. When America entered the First World War in nineteen seventeen, Roosevelt's four sons all enlisted.
The youngest, Quentin Roosevelt, became a fighter pilot in France. On July fourteenth, nineteen eighteen, he was shot down behind German lines and killed at age twenty. His father died less than six months later.
This memorial in Oyster Bay honors Quentin and the other local men who died in the war. Theodore Roosevelt himself is buried nearby at Young's Memorial Cemetery. For the town that knew the Roosevelts personally, these were not distant casualties of a distant war.
