Horace Cullen Story (1792–1823), soldier and engineer, was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the younger brother of United States Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, and graduated from Harvard University in 1811. He joined the United States Army Corps of Engineers as a second lieutenant in 1814, was breveted the same year for gallantry in a sortie from Fort Erie, and rose to first lieutenant in 1818. The following year Story was stationed in Alabama to help build public works at Mobile Point. When he died in New Orleans, he was overseeing the erection of fortifications at Fort Plaquemine (Essex Institute, Historical Collections 51 [1915]: 50–1; Harvard Catalogue description begins Harvard University Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates, 1636–1925, 1925 description ends , 189; Heitman, U.S. Army description begins Francis B. Heitman, comp., Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army, 1903, repr. 1994, 2 vols. description ends , 1:930; Calhoun, Papers description begins Robert L. Meriwether, W. Edwin Hemphill, Clyde N. Wilson, and others, eds., The Papers of John C. Calhoun, 1959–2003, 28 vols. description ends , 4:268, 5:368–9, 6:289–90; New Orleans Courrier de la Louisiane, 4 Aug. 1823).

The east india marine society was established in 1799 with an exclusive membership of Salem shipmasters who had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. In the 1860s it transformed into the Peabody Academy of Science, which changed its name early in the twentieth century to the Peabody Museum of Salem (Walter Muir Whitehill, The East India Marine Society and the Peabody Museum of Salem: A Sesquicentennial History [1949]). In 1992 it merged with the Essex Institute to form the Peabody Essex Museum.

On this day Story sent the same enclosure with a similar letter to James Madison (Madison, Papers, Retirement Ser., 2:503–4).