A stack of letters written more than a century ago forms the core of a new book about early Fairhaven.

The locally published book is appropriately titled "My Darling Anna," because the letters were sent to Anna Kurtz of Iowa by her fiancé, Will Gray, a fledgling physician who set out West with the hope of establishing a business and a home before taking her hand in marriage.

Gray hung his shingle in Fairhaven during the boom year of 1890, but was forced to return to Iowa a year later when an economic crash left him broke.  

To our good fortune today, he wrote frequent letters to Anna detailing his life in the southernmost pioneer community on Bellingham Bay, as well as his undying love for her.

To our further good fortune, Gray was an educated man who loved Shakespeare. A fluid writer, his letters in the book, some verbatim, some excerpted, needed little to no editing.

"They're remarkably well-written," said retired Bellingham businessman Brian Griffin, one of the book's two authors.

Griffin is known locally for his civic activities and for his 2007 history book, "Boulevard Park & Taylor Avenue Dock on the Old Bellingham Waterfront."

The other co-author, Neelie Nelson, is a newcomer to the area. A retired office manager, she and her husband, Steve, moved to Bellingham from California in 2007.

Nelson's previous work researching her husband's family tree, in part, sparked her interest in local history once they settled here. She was investigating the history of old Fairhaven buildings to update the city of Bellingham's Web site when a state archivist suggested she look at some old letters written by a doctor who had spent time in Fairhaven.

By then, Nelson knew Griffin through his book, his art work, and his research for his own history book about Fairhaven. When Griffin looked at the letters, he quickly realized they were linked to a prominent person that he and many other local residents had known.

It turns out that Will and Anna's only child was Margaret Gray. She shared her father's love of language, and went on to become a beloved drama teacher at Bellingham High School from 1938 to 1958. During that span, her students presented an operetta every year, laying the groundwork for the school's ongoing strong tradition in theater.

The Gray family, including young Margaret, resettled in Fairhaven in 1901, a decade after her father left, when the local economy was back on the upswing. Griffin was so taken by the letters, and by their connection to Margaret Gray, that he put his own Fairhaven book on hold to work on "My Darling Anna."

"I'm a victim of enthusiasm," he confessed.

Griffin was a student of Gray's at Bellingham High and still remembers struggling with, then mastering, the art of standing up in class and reading Shakespeare aloud.

"She taught me to speak," he said. "She taught me to respect the language."

The same respect shines through in her father's letters.

 

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EXCERPTS

Excerpts from letters written from Fairhaven by Dr. William Gray

• July 24, 1890: "You will hear Fairhaven spoken of as truly beautiful but that is not so. It is potentially beautiful. Its site is beautiful and the city will be so, but it is not now. It is too full of half burned stumps and unfinished and unpainted wooden buildings but another year will change much of that and then it can make some pretension to beauty. I think it has the possibility of being the most beautiful city along the Sound. Its prospects also grow brighter all the time."

• Aug. 21, 1890 (the second anniversary of his marriage proposal to Anna Kurtz, in Iowa): "The years have but strengthened the affection that I then felt toward you and I know it to be deep and lasting, beyond any power to change. It has become stamped into the very fiber of my being."