Oil tycoon is donating $50M to Theodore Roosevelt library

Oil industry giant Harold Hamm will contribute $50 million to the planned Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota.

Gov. Doug Burgum announced Hamm’s donation in his State of the State address to the Legislature on Tuesday. The library will honor the 26th president, who ranched and hunted in the Medora Badlands of western North Dakota in the 1880s. It will be built on 90 acres of former U.S. Forest Service land near Medora, outside Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Hamm founded Continental Resources and pioneered horizontal drilling in North Dakota’s oil-rich Bakken region.

“We invest in big ideas that are built to last,” Hamm said in a statement. “The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library will inspire Americans for centuries not decades.”