The FBI released a quick but curious bit of local news in June: Agents from its Art Crime Team had recovered a 141-year-old thank-you note, written by Charles Darwin, from a house in Northwest DC. The letter had been missing from the Smithsonian since 1978.
It wasn’t a vital piece of correspondence, just one of thousands Darwin wrote to fellow scientists over his lifetime. Perhaps that’s why no one at the institution had realized it was missing—and why the people who had the letter didn’t know they did.
The story of the discovery turns out to be more interesting than the letter itself. It begins in 2015, when Keke and John Anderson returned home from vacation. John Anderson, now 95, isn’t your average Washingtonian: The former Republican congressman ran for President in 1980 as an independent, winning an impressive 6.6 percent of the vote.
While the Andersons were away, one of their adult children cleaned out John’s old congressional desk, now in the garage of the couple’s Spring Valley home. Inside the desk was Darwin’s letter.
It turned out Keke Anderson had seen it before. According to an FBI report, she recognized it as a letter her son, John Jr., had brought home from a long-ago Smithsonian summer internship. At the time, he told his mother he’d removed the note before it was catalogued, meaning no one would miss it. Mom was unimpressed and insisted he return it.
Read more:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/03/06/presidential-candidates-son-darwin-letter-fbi/
