Home Sweet Home

The words are older than the house. "Home! Sweet Home!" was written by John Howard Payne, an American actor and playwright born in New York in 1791, for the 1823 opera Clari, or the Maid of Milan, with music by the Englishman Henry Bishop. The sheet music sold about 100,000 copies quickly, and Payne, with little head for business, did not profit.

In the Civil War it became the song both armies shared. On the night of December 31, 1862, before the Battle of Stones River, Union and Confederate bands were playing their evening concerts when one closed with it, and both sides joined in. Some Union officers later banned it from camp for fear it would make men desert.

Payne died in Tunis in 1852, where he was serving as United States consul, and in 1883 his remains were brought to Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Here the word DAD is lettered in thin navy capitals, and the A is a small cottage with a red roof, a smoking chimney and a window lit yellow. Hearts and little sprigs are tucked around its walls on a cream ground. The roof is the crossbar of the letter, which makes the father the part of the word that keeps the weather out.