Teddy Roosevelt presidential library opens July 4 in Dakota Badlands, 107 years after his death

The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is set to open July 4 in Medora, North Dakota, part of the state's notoriously rugged Badlands where the 26th president lives before entering the White House.

The 96,000-square-foot library opens 107 years after Roosevelt's death. 

"Nature is transformative here. It transformed Theodore Roosevelt, and it will transform new visitors to this library," architect Craig Dykers told CBS News for a preview story on the library that aired Sunday. "We wanted something that just felt primitive. And so, this form emerging from the Earth, it felt like it just arrived from the Earth."

Roosevelt was a native New Yorker, but he moved to the North Dakota territory in 1884 to grieve the same-day, Valentine's Day deaths of his wife and mother. He then spent roughly two years working in the region as a cowboy.

The $450 million library is next door to Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

Roosevelt was a member of the Republican Party until 1912, when he left to run for an additional term under the banner of his own newly formed Progressive Party.

The library has taken possession of a statue of Roosevelt that was removed in 2022 from outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Critics argued that the message of a white man elevated above both a Native American and an African symbolized racial superiority, also according to CBS News.