New Exhibit at Home of Titanic Survivor Molly Brown

“It is a fine ship, but I shall await my journey’s end before I pass judgment on her,” Archibald Gracie presciently wrote in a letter to a friend while sailing aboard the Titanic in April 1912, and had it posted on a stop in Ireland.

Credit: Henry Aldridge & Son

A few days later, as we all know, the "unsinkable" new vessel famously collided with an iceberg and sank into the chilly waters of the North Atlantic. His friend, A.P. Brooks, received the letter at the Waldorf Hotel in London, then kept it for the rest of his life.

Eventually, the letter was sold at auction earlier this year by one of Brooks’ descendants, for roughly $400,000. The buyer’s identity is unknown, but whoever acquired it letter is kindly going to share the letter with the world, as it’s now on display at the Molly Brown House Museum - an institution in Denver dedicated to preserving the life and legacy of Titanic survivor Margaret Brown, the American philanthropist and activist who later became known as the “Unsinkable Molly Brown.”

The museum, in Brown’s former home, has two letters Gracie wrote to Brown just weeks before his death in its permanent collection. It also has a substantial selection of Titanic-related artifacts. So when the letter Gracie wrote while on board the ship became available this spring, the museum’s curators kept a close eye on the auction results.

“We were quite surprised - and delighted - to learn that the Gracie letter had been purchased by a private collector known to the museum, and then to hear that it was their intention to loan the letter to us for its public debut,” Andrea Malcomb, director of the Molly Brown House Museum, told Smithsonian magazine. “We were … thrilled and honored to have been chosen to be the very first museum to have such a significant artifact on display.”