Literary Rescue Mission

By Cassie J. Moore

Photograph by Sandy Huffaker

Just before Christmas in 1989, Andrew Carroll suffered the personal loss that would inspire his future. His father called him at college to say the family home had been destroyed by a fire.

“Everything was gone,” Mr. Carroll says. “And really, the worst part of it was losing all my letters. Everything else — the books, the CD’s, the clothes, and the furniture — could be replaced. But the letters were gone.”

Sensitive to the loss, he began to try to save other people’s letters. In 1998, the Legacy Project officially began as Mr. Carroll’s all-volunteer effort to collect war letters, mostly missives written home to family and friends from troops at war.

For many years the collection was stored in Mr. Carroll’s Washington office and apartment. But in September, with his collection reaching about 75,000 letters, Mr. Carroll arranged for most of them to be housed at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, in New York.

To mark Veterans’ Day, a small sampling of letters will be temporarily on display at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum, in Washington, starting this week. The exhibit, entitled “War Letters: Lost and Found,” will highlight letters formerly trashed or forgotten.

Norma Kipp Avendano was one of the donors who contributed to the collection, providing about a dozen letters written by her late husband while he was serving as a Marine captain in the Solomon Islands during World War II.

The couple began their relationship as pen pals and married upon Harry Kipp’s return home from the war. Here, she shows a letter to Mr. Carroll.