‘Faithfully yours, Henry Beston’ scrapbooks, 50 years of friendship

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In the late 1920s, around the time Henry Beston erected his Cape Cod seaside hut The Fo’castle -- best known to the world as “The Outermost House” from the name of his 1928 international bestselling nature classic -- he met and befriended surfman Kenneth T. Young of the U.S. Coast Guard and his wife, Frances Thacher Young. For half a century, Frances Young kept Beston’s greeting cards, letters and postcards in scrapbooks, along with dozens of newspaper clippings about Beston’s life and work, and that of his wife, the author Elizabeth Coatsworth Beston. The correspondence continued after Beston’s 1968 death, into Elizabeth Beston’s twilight years in the 1980s – an intimate time capsule of a loving friendship and the couples’ lives. Frances Young’s treasured archive came to light for the first time in mid-2023 and is now being offered publicly for the first time. The archive includes @ 30 cards and letters signed by Beston, nearly 50 from Elizabeth Coatsworth Beston – and a rare, original miniature watercolor painting of The Outermost House, which two authorities on Beston believe was painted by Beston himself.