In September, the Dry Salvages Festival celebrated T. S. Eliot's early years summering in Gloucester, and their influence on his body of poetry. Included in the program was a collection of artifacts, many borrowed from Harvard's Houghton Library and displayed in the Cape Ann Museum Library. Among the documents was the poet’s first preserved correspondence, a letter to his father written in 1895. COSMOS has secured permission from the T. S. Eliot Estate to publish a transcription of the composition, originally written in the formal cursive style of the time.
While the Eliot family had roots in England and New England, they resided in St. Louis, Missouri where Henry Ware Eliot (1843-1919) was a successful businessman and president of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company. In the era before the invention of air conditioning, people with means escaped the insufferable summer heat by heading to distant Northern and Eastern shores. Thus grew the summer destinations of Boston’s North Shore, Rhode Island’s Newport, and Maine’s Bar Harbor and many islands. The Eliot family, which included six children, became summer residents of Gloucester, Massachusetts.