Ann Buchanan Eads wrote a warm, unschooled letter: "Dear Martha," she began, "you will meet a mothers welcome and shear a mothers love and I do not know anything to mar your happiness; except your ...

In the spring of 1887, worn and frail, the engineer James Buchanan Eads propped himself ... the third child of Ann and Thomas Eads. His father moved the family from one town to the next, trying ...