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Why did Robert Frost move from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, as a child?

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Robert Frost, 1954 — Robert Frost “Good fences make good neighbors.” Robert Frost crafted some of the most indelible lines in American poetry in such poems as “Mending Wall” (1914).

Robert Frost did not move to Lawrence, Massachusetts, because of a personal choice or career ambition, but rather due to a family tragedy. Following the untimely death of his father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., from tuberculosis in 1885, his mother, Isabelle Moodie Frost, relocated with Robert and his sister, Jeanie, to Lawrence, Massachusetts.1

The family was subsequently taken in by the children’s paternal grandparents, providing them with a home while their mother pursued work as a teacher in the region.1