The Cabot Story
The Cabot Story
Henry Lovewell Lutts was born in Kittery, Maine in 1849. He was a self-employed housebuilder by trade, and the houses on Lutts Avenue in Kittery stand as a reminder of his work. Later in life, Henry built houses in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, typically moving in once the roof was on and selling it when he could move into his next one.
His second son was Carlton Gardner Lutts. Thanks to his father’s occupation, Carlton moved 26 times as a child. He was an inventor and entrepreneur and he started businesses making and selling jigsaw puzzles and chemically treated paper roses that forecast the weather. But those were just sidelines. Carlton was a metallurgist by trade and he worked at the Boston Naval Shipyard. He had patents on methods of chain manufacture that brought in royalties.

His wife, Grace Alberta Smith of Salem, had a “money mind” from the start. She bought her first house at age 19, with her own savings, over the objections of the bankers who were unaccustomed to dealing with single young women. Grace was a lifelong investor in stocks, favoring the buy-and-hold method. She and Carlton had three children. And in 1941, at Grace’s urging, they used the chain patent royalties to buy the old Cabot Farm in Salem. The property is named after Joseph Sebastian Cabot who was president of both the Asiatic Bank and Salem Savings Bank and served as the fourth Mayor of Salem from 1845–1849. Today, that 28-acre property (pictured right) is home to roughly 30 members of the Lutts family.
Carlton and Grace’s second son, Carlton Gardner Lutts Jr., was trained as an engineer, but his love was the stock market. In 1970, driven by a desire to share his thoughts on stock selection and market timing, he began writing and publishing the Cabot Market Letter (named after the farm) on the proverbial kitchen table. As the years passed, his homespun wisdom and irrepressible passion helped hundreds of thousands of investors build big profits in great growth stocks like Fleetwood, WD-40, American Medical and Syntex.
Carlton’s first son, Timothy, joined the Cabot publishing business (by then incorporated as Cabot Heritage) in 1986 to contribute advice on investing in mutual funds, which were then enjoying a boom. As time went by, Timothy filled the Cabot stable with experts on value investing, international investing, energy investing, small-cap investing and more. Cabot Heritage is now called Cabot Wealth Network.
Carlton’s second son, Robert, founded Cabot Money Management in 1983, to fulfill the demands of Cabot subscribers who had been asking for investment management services. Today, Cabot continues to thrive under its new name, Cabot Wealth Management, which reflects the full range of wealth management services provided to individuals, families and institutions.
Carlton’s third son, Andrew, launched the internet service company NetAtlantic in 1995, and today that successful company helps hundreds of organizations worldwide communicate with their customers.
Carlton passed away in 2012, but his spirit lives on in the successful companies that share common roots. His passion for business will continue to drive success for many years to come.