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Friends recommended it, James and Sara and Franklin visited it, and James and Sara decided to build a cottage there. Upon its completion, months at Campobello became a summer ritual for the family.
    A central part of that ritual was sailing. Franklin crewed for his father until he was tall enough to see over the tiller, at which point he often took the helm. The winds in the Bay of Fundy could be daunting, even in summer, and the tides, among the highest in the world, challenged the sharpest sailor. Franklin thrived on the tests.
    Sailing and the sea absorbed him. He consumed books about boats and the feats of great mariners. He doodled sloops and ketches in the margins of the work he did for his tutors; his earliest surviving letter to his mother—doubtless the first he wrote, as Sara saved everything—included a remarkably evocative rendering of three vessels under sail. He could scarcely contain his excitement while waiting for the Half Moon to be delivered. “Papa is going to buy a cutter that will go by naphtha”—for the auxiliary engine—“and we are going to sail in it at Campobello,” he wrote his aunt in the spring of 1891. When the family traveled to Germany that summer, he apprised his cousins of his favorite activities: “On this paper is a picture of the big lake on which we row, and Papa got me a great big boat and I sail it every day.”
     

     
    E NDICOTT P EABODY WAS an American-born, English-schooled Episcopalian priest and the walking, breathing embodiment of the manly Christian virtues as they were understood in America of the Victorian age. He excelled at sports, especially boxing, and had faced down rowdies from his first pulpit, in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. (He arrived not long after the infamous 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral, in which the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday exchanged lethal fire with Ike and Billy Clanton and their friends.) Besides improving his boxing skills, Peabody’s Arizona experience revealed a knack for fundraising; he frequented the saloons of the town in a successful effort to persuade the patrons to contribute to the construction of a proper church for the frontier diocese.
    Upon his return to the East, he devoted this talent to the fulfillment of a long-standing dream to establish an American school for young men that would reproduce the best of English private education. It helped Peabody’s cause that his family was rich and well connected. His father was a partner of J. P. Morgan’s father, and his brother had married into the Lawrence family of Massachusetts. The Lawrences summered at Campobello with the James Roosevelts, to whom they described Peabody’s plan for a boys’ school. James Roosevelt was impressed by the board of trustees Peabody had put together, starting with Morgan. Sara Roosevelt took note that the most distinguished families of New York and Boston were enrolling their sons for admission, years before the boys would be old enough to enter the school. Lest Franklin lose out, she put his name on the list.
    By the time Franklin arrived, in September 1896, Peabody’s vision had taken fair shape. The school was located thirty-five miles north of Boston, above the Nashua River and two miles from Groton village, which was just visible from the higher parts of the hundred-acre campus. The school’s handful of structures included a classroom building, a chapel, a gymnasium, a boathouse, and the most recent addition, the Hundred House, opened in 1891 as a dormitory for the hundred boys of the school. Students typically entered at age twelve and remained for six years, but because Sara couldn’t part with Franklin so young, he didn’t enter till fourteen, when he joined the students of the third “form,” or year.
    His early months at Groton marked the first time he’d been away from his family circle for long, and he was predictably homesick. “Thanks very much for your letters,” he wrote his parents in late September. “The more the