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The Atlanta Historical Journal

WINTER 1979-80 Volume XXIII Number 4

The Atlanta Historical Journal

Franklin M. Garrett Editor Emeritus

Ann E. Woodall Editor

Harvey H. Jackson Book Review Editor

Volume XXRI, Number 4 Winter 1979/80

Copyright 1980 by Atlanta Historical Society, Inc. Atlanta, Georgia COVER: This drawing of an Agnes Scott student holding a basketball was rendered by Philip Shutze for the 1912 Silhouette.

The Atlanta Historical Journal is published quarterly by the Atlanta Historical Society, P.O. Box 12423, Atlanta, Georgia, 30355. Subscriptions are available to non-members of the Society.

Manuscripts, books for review, exchange journals, and subscription inquiries should be sent to the Editor.

If your copy of the Journal is damaged in the mail, please call the Society for a replacement. Please notify the Society of changes in address. TABLE OF CONTENTS Officers, Trustees, Past Presidents, and Past Chairmen of the Board 4 Publications Committee, Editorial Review Board, Staff 5 Editor's Note 6 Nellie Peters Black: Turn of the Century "Mover and Shaker" By Jane Bonner Peacock 7 The Role of Women in Atlanta's Churches, 1865-1906 By Harvey K. Newman 17 "Not a Veneer or a Sham": The Early Days of Agnes Scott By Amy Friedlander 31 Woman Suffrage Activities in Atlanta By A. Elizabeth Taylor 45 Women Authors of Atlanta: A Selection of Representative Works with an Analytic Commentary By Barbara B. Reitt 55 The High Heritage By Carlyn Gaye Crannell 71 Women Architects in Atlanta, 1895-1979 By Susan Hunter Smith 85 Book Reviews 109 New Members 126 In Memoriam 127 Academic Advisory Board, "Atlanta Women from Myth to Modern Times" 128 THE ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

OFFICERS Stephens Mitchell Chairman Emeritus, Board of Trustees Beverly M. DuBose, Jr Chairman, Board of Trustees Dr. John B. Hardman Vice Chairman, Board of Trustees Virlyn B. Moore, Jr President Jack Spalding First Vice President Mrs. Ivan. Allen, Jr Second Vice Preident Tom Watson Brown Secretary Julian J. Barfield Treasurer Henry L. Howell Assistant Treasurer TRUSTEES Cecil A. Alexander Henry L. Howell Mrs. Ivan Allen, Jr. Dr. Willis Hubert Julian J. Barfield Dr. Harvey H. Jackson Dr. Crawford Barnett, Jr. George Missbach Alex W. Bealer Stephens Mitchell E. William Bohn Mrs. John Mobley Tom Watson Brown Virlyn B. Moore, Jr. Dr. F. Phinizy Calhoun William A. Parker Mrs. Julian S. Carr H. English Robinson Thomas Hal Clarke Mrs. William Schroder George S. Craft Mrs. Robert Shaw Beverly M. DuBose, Jr. Mrs. Roff Sims Franklin M. Garrett John M. Slaton, Jr. Mrs. William W. Griffin Mrs. John E. Smith II Richard Guthman Jack Spalding Dr. John B. Hardman Mrs. Thomas R. Williams Edward C. Harris William L. Pressly, Ex Officio Honorary The Hon. Mrs. Robert W. Chambers Mrs. Richard W. Courts, Jr. Philip T. Shutze Robert W. Woodruff PAST PRESIDENTS Walter McElreath October, 1926-June 30, 1933 Eugene Muse Mitchell June 30, 1933-July 11, 1936 Jack Johnson Spalding July 11, 1936-July 30, 1938 Frank Kells Boland, M.D July 30, 1938-Jan. 31, 1942 Franklin Miller, Garrett Jan. 31, 1942-Jan. 30, 1943 Henry Aaron Alexander Jan. 30, 1943-Jan. 16, 1948 Beverly Means DuBose, Sr Jan. 16, 1948-Jan. 19, 1952 John Ashley Jones Jan. 19, 1952-Jan. 16, 1954 Ivan Allen, Sr Jan. 16, 1954-Jan. 21, 1956 Stephens Mitchell Jan. 21, 1956-Jan. 25, 1958 Beverly Means DuBose, Jr Jan. 25, 1958-Jan. 16, 1960 Franklin Miller Garrett Jan. 16, 1960-Jan. 29, 1965 Thomas Hal Clarke Jan. 29, 1965-Jan. 27, 1967 Beverly Means DuBose, Jr Jan. 27, 1967-May 2, 1976 PAST CHAIRMEN OF THE BOARD Walter McElreath June 30, 1933-Dec. 6, 1951 Gordon Forrest Mitchell Dec. 12, 1951-Aug. 2, 1956 John Marshall Slaton, Jr Aug. 8, 1956-Jan. 25, 1958 Stephens Mitchell Jan. 25, 1958-Jan. 27, 1967 Franklin Miller Garrett Jan. 21, 1967-Mar. 12, 1968 Jesse Draper Apr. 1, 1968-Sept. 24, 1973 Samuel Inman Cooper Oct. 22, 1973-Apr. 22, 1974 William A. Parker Apr. 22, 1974-June 1, 1978 PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE

Alex W. Bealer, Chairman Dr. John Hardman Mrs. George W. Kennedy Dr. Clarence A. Bacote Kent Higgins Mrs. Lamar Peacock Dr. Crawford F. Barnett, Jr. Henry Howell Mrs. Martin Sherry Dr. Dan T. Carter Dr. Harvey H. Jackson

STAFF Judson C. Ward Administrator William L. Pressly Director of Development Franklin M. Garrett Historian and Editor Emeritus Sara Roberts Secretary to Dr. Ward Lillian Salter Secretary to Mr. Garrett Elma Kurtz Administrative Assistant Marguerite Somers Assistant to Mrs. Kurtz Elizabeth Reynolds Curator Louise Shaw Assistant Curator Laura Inman Coordinator, Public Relations Madeline Reamy Educational Coordinator Ann Woodall Editor Jane Peacock Assistant Editor Patsy Wiggins Acquisitions Director Richard Elzroth Manuscripts Curator Mamie Locke Archivist John Robert Smith Assistant Archivist Eugene Craig Librarian Anne Salter Research Assistant Alicia Clarke Registrar Janet Brooks Photographer Lee Mize Visual Arts Coordinator Harold Moore Document Conservator Nancy Lester Coordinator, Swan House Sally Funkhouser Assistant Cooodinator, Swan House Boyd Beamer Assistant Coordinator, Swan House Margaret Brock Coordinator, Tullie Smith House Dot Evans Assistant Coordinator, Tullie Smith House Bonnie Beard Weekend Assistant, Swan House Betty Gage Weekend Assistant, Swan House Janet MacKenzie Weekend Assistant, Swan House Meredith Edmondson Weekend Assistant, Swan House Mary Shouse Weekend Assistant, Tullie Smith House Peggy Smith Weekend Assistant, Tullie Smith House James Crittle Member, Custodial Staff C. E. Lovelace Member, Custodial Staff David Sparks Member, Custodial Staff Geraldine Thornton Member, Custodial Staff

EDITORIAL REVIEW BOARD Dr. Clarence A. Bacote Dr. George R. Lamplugh Atlanta University The Westminster Schools Dr. Gary M. Fink Dr. Robert C. McMath, Jr. Georgia State University Georgia Institute of Technology Dr. Jane Herndon Dr. Bradley R. Rice DeKalb Community College Clayton Junior College Dr. Harvey H. Jackson Dr. S. Fred Roach Clayton Junior College Kennesaw College Dr. Philip Secrist Southern Technical Institute Editors Note This issue of our Journal was designed as a companion piece to the outstanding exhibit now gracing the Society's Cox Gallery, "Atlanta Women from Myth to Modern Times." Project director Louise Shaw and former editor Grace Sherry initiated a wide-ranging search for manu­ scripts on Atlanta women and Atlanta women's issues in December of 1978. A special academic advisory board was established to select the most representative articles which have been published here. In subse­ quent issues we will feature other articles generated by this project. An additional highlight to the Society's focus on women's studies will be the two-day symposium sponsored by the Society, Spelman Col­ lege, Agnes Scott College, Emory University, and the Junior League of Atlanta which will be held at Spelman November 13-15. In this forum scholars will present papers on topics related to the theme of the exhibi­ tion. The symposium will be open to the public. Readers interested in specific Atlanta women or in more general themes in the history of Atlanta women will find a wealth of manuscript and photographic material at their disposal in the Society's archives. And, finally, readers desiring an overview of this specialized aspect of Atlanta's history are encouraged to purchase a copy of the handsome catalogue accompanying the "From Myth to Modern Times" exhibition. Copies are on sale at McElreath Hall. Our thanks to the authors and the readers who worked so hard on this issue. Ann Woodall Editor Nellie Peters Blach: Turn of the Century "Mouer and Shaher

By Jane Bonner Peacock*

Born into wealth and social prominence, Nellie Peters Black might have frittered her life away in trivial concerns. Instead she turned out­ ward, toward the underprivileged. Her era, encompassing both the Civil War and World War I, offered new opportunities in community service for leisure-class women of vigor and resourcefulness, and she is represent­ ative of a group of Atlanta women who brought significant improvements to the city. In a book publicizing the 1895 Cotton States and International Ex­ position, Nellie was described as "a philanthropist, a humanitarian, a woman of broad sympathy and kindly impulses, [who] has succeeded in accomplishing more real good in Atlanta than any other woman of today."1 The "real good" Mrs. Black was able to do is reflected in an interest­ ing collection of biographical material and personal reminiscenses in the archives of the Atlanta Historical Society. Known in Atlanta for her work among the disadvantaged, she helped found the first mission Sunday School in the city, one of the first charity hospitals, the Free Kindergarten Association, and the Visiting Nurse Association. On a broader level, she served as chairman of the hospital and nursery department of the Cotton States and International Exposi­ tion and was a founder and president of the Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs. In this capacity she lectured in all the congressional districts of the state on diversified farming, appearing also before the General Assembly to argue for compulsory education laws.2 When Mary Ellen (Nellie) Peters was born in 1851, Atlanta was busily astir as a newly created railroad center, and her father, Richard Peters, was well on his way toward becoming one of the city's most successful businessmen. A civil engineer, he had come to Georgia from Pennsylvania in 1835 and had risen rapidly in his work with the Georgia Railroad; he helped plan the line from Augusta to Athens and became superintendent and general manager in 1837. During the panic of 1840 when railroad stock dropped sharply, he "purchased all the shares [he]

* Assistant editor ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY could manage to pay for." Un­ happy with the name "Marthas­ ville" when the Georgia Railroad was completed to that point in 1845, he consulted with J. Edgar Thompson, chief engineer, who proposed the name "Atlanta" for the fledgling city. A short time later Peters resigned his position and bought a stagecoach line run­ ning from Madison, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama. Over the next few years Peters made real estate investments which re­ warded him handsomely.3 Among them was a purchase of four acres in downtown Atlanta for $225, later sold for $5,000 to the city government, which erected a City Hall (now the site of the Georgia State Capitol) on the property.4

Nellie Peters holding doll, c. 1862 (AHS Collections)

One of Richard Peters's primary interests was agriculture. In 1847 he purchased a farm in Gordon County where he conducted experiments in livestock breeding and in horticulture, bringing Jersey cows and An­ gora goats into this country and growing plants which were shipped from his nursery on Fair Street. One transaction before the Civil War involved the transporting of 4,000 young trees to California by way of Cape Horn.5 Also in 1847, Peters bought a house on a two-acre lot at the corner of Mitchell and Forsyth streets. Here he brought his bride in 1848. The marriage added to his stature in the city, for she was Mary Jane Thomp­ son, daughter of Dr. Joseph Thompson, a prominent physician and owner of the Atlanta Hotel.6 Nellie was the second of nine children, the first daughter. Her child­ hood during the 1850s must have seemed a very secure one. Brothers and sisters continued to arrive, but there were four servants to help with their care.7 They were a church-going family; Richard Peters helped found St. Philip's Episcopal Church, although later, during the war, he and his wife began attending services in a new Episcopal church on Walton Street, St. Luke's, organized by their friend the Reverend Charles Todd Quintard. Used in the service of Holy Communion were two silver goblets presented to the young parish by Nellie's mother.8 It was because of her affiliation with St. Luke's Church that Nellie Journal — Winter 1979 9 acquired an early touch of fame as a young teenager. The Reverend Quintard, who became the second Bishop of Tennessee after the war, wrote an article for the church Intelligencer titled, "Nellie Peters' Pocket Handkerchief and What It Saw."9 He told the story of the siege of Atlanta from the imagined viewpoint of Nellie's handkerchief, dropped during the funeral of her infant brother Stephen Elliott Peters in June of 1864. During the shelling of the city, an explosive tore into the church and broke the prayer desk, but was smothered by the large Bible which fell upon it. "There the Bible lay — God's message of good will — with this missile of darkness and death beneath it. . . ." Although in this instance St. Luke's building was saved, it did not escape Sherman's torches and several years elapsed before its revival in 1870. In the meantime the Peters family reaffiliated with St. Philip's and maintained their membership there for many years.10 Nellie was made aware early of the needs of the less fortunate. Nine years old when the Civil War began, she accompanied her mother in her rounds of several temporary hospitals set up during the war years to handle the stream of wounded soldiers flooding the city." Mrs. Peters possessed "the only carriage in town and with every wedding or funeral it was called for." Because her husband was a partner in a blockade- running enterprise, she was able later to reminisce: Mr. Peters was a generous and careful provider for his family. He kept us supplied with everything from farm, garden and blockade vessels. In that way we could help others. It was my pleasure to go each day in the carriage with my baby and nurse, and carry cans of fresh buttermilk, baskets of cakes and biscuit to the hospitals and send kettles of hot coffee when needed for the sick and wounded soldiers as they arrived in the city. The family's prominence did not prevent their panic-stricken depar­ ture from Atlanta as Sherman's troops converged upon it; however, it made their travel easier. At two o'clock on the morning of July 9, 1864, David Mayer, a friend and member of Governor Joseph E. Brown's staff, awoke the household with news that the Chattahoochee River bridge was burning and that it was feared the Federals would be in Atlanta by the following night. Mrs. Peters remembered: We looked out through the darkness and saw the fire. We hurriedly dressed, packed trunks and bedding, and by six o'clock had a special train take us to Augusta, where we had been invited to stay with Judge John P. King at his home on the Sand Hills. Mr. Peters remained in Atlanta to look after the railroad. Mr. Peters being director of the Georgia Railroad Bank, all bank valuables with a young guard go [sic] with us in a box car, our beds and other things piled on the chests of valuables. Nellie remained in Augusta with her mother, brothers, and sisters during the shelling and burning of Atlanta. After Sherman's departure 10 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY in November, Mrs. Peters, hearing stories of the desecration of Oakland Cemetery, became increasingly uneasy about the graves of two of her children buried there, and in December she hired a carriage to take her into the ruined city, a two-day trip. She found Atlanta cold and desolate, covered with sleet, but the graves were unmolested. Satisfied, she re­ turned to Augusta until the rebuilding ofthe Georgia Railroad was com­ plete, and "we could comfortably come back home."12 The war did not bankrupt Richard Peters. An early opponent of secession, he had realized the handicaps under which the Confederacy would fight. Although its early successes were encouraging, he agreed with the realistic views expressed by his friend Judge King and later wrote, "I never again altered my opinion of the ultimate result, and tried to shape my course so as to save our property when the crash came."13 As a result of her father's business acumen, Nellie was able to re­ ceive the education most young Georgia women of her age were denied. She was sent to school at Miss Maria Eastman's Brooke Hall in Media, Pennsylvania. Returning to Atlanta, Nellie did not marry until she was twenty-six years old, but there was probably no lack of suitors for such an eligible young woman. One admirer wrote her from Augusta, February 20, 1871: My dear Miss Peters: The kind invitation to yr "Charity Party" reached me just one day after the feast, my absence from town occasioning the delay. I regret it very much as nothing would have given me more pleasure than to have renewed our long, solved engagement by the re-re-redelivery of the diamond ring and the plighting of my troth again. Can't you get up another Charity Party? 'Twould be genuine charity to me & I promise to come and dance for very joy.14 It is not surprising that the occasion referred to was a charity affair; personal reminiscences of Mrs. Black's contemporaries refer to her riding her black horse Diamond through the slum areas of the city during the 1870s. Her first real charity work, however, began in 1872 when her father donated a lot at the southeast corner of Second Street, now Ponce de Leon and Juniper, for construction ofthe Holy Innocents' Chapel to serve poor people who lived in this area. She taught Sunday school there and ministered "to the sick and needy" for the five years prior to her mar­ riage.15 Early in 1877 she began to write school friends about her impending nuptials. One friend replied, "I am prepared to fall in love myself with Col. Black after your impartial description of him. If he is only a quarter as nice as you are I will be quite satisfied."16 Although he was an attorney, "Col. Black's" title was a real one, not the honorary one conferred on southern lawyers at that time. George Robison Black had served as lieutenant colonel of the 63rd Regiment, Journal — Winter 1979 11

The Peters home on Peachtree Street, built in 1881 (ASH Collection)

Georgia Volunteer Infantry during the war.17 In 1877 he was forty-two years old, a widower with four children. He was a member ofthe Georgia legislature at the time ofthe wedding on April 17 at St. Philip's Church, a ceremony presided over by the Reverend R. C. Foute, assisted by a family friend, Bishop John W. Beckwith. The couple moved to Black's home in Sylvania, Georgia, where Nel­ lie took over the care of his four children, later giving birth to three of their own: Nita Hughes in 1878, Louise King in 1879, and Ralph Peters in 1881. The marriage, however, was a short one. In 1882, while serving in Washington, D.C., as representative to the 47th Congress, Black suf­ fered a stroke and died in November 1886.18 Two years later Nellie moved with her children back to Atlanta, into her parents' new house on Peach- tree Street.19 Atlanta by 1890 had a population of nearly 89,000, offering the possi­ bility of community endeavors which must have appealed to Nellie Black. She became president in 1889 of a benevolent society listed in the City Directory as the King's Daughters. Within a year she had organized one of the first charity hospitals in the city, the King's Daughters Hospi­ tal at 180 South Pryor Street, which operated there for several years before moving to Grady Hospital where it was eventually incorporated by that institution.20 12 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY When Atlantans began to plan for the Cotton States and Interna­ tional Exposition to be held in 1895, Mrs. Black was asked to be chair­ man ofthe nursery and hospital committee ofthe Women's Department. She set to work, requesting donations from various businesses of cots, hospital furniture, nursery bottles, and milk. In an article in the Atlanta Journal, January 6, 1896, it was reported that during the Exposition 2,085 cases "from all over the world" were treated in the hospital and 1,115 babies were examined by a staff of twenty volunteer physicians. The Exposition also spawned an effort that utilized Nellie's talents for a number of years. Interested in the exhibition on kindergartens housed in the Woman's Building, she joined a group who founded the Atlanta Free Kindergarten Association in 1896. She became its first pres­ ident, serving until 1914. During that first year, a free kindergarten was opened on Magnolia Street near the Atlanta Cotton Mill. Some of the early gifts to the Association included $200 from the Atlanta Woman's Club, $100 from Mrs. Joseph Thompson representing the Potter Palmer fund, $200 raised from a cooking school, and $750 made at a charity ball. An Atlanta Journal article written by Nellie Black in 1904 showed her pride in the work she had accomplished: "A liberal public has ever been ready to lend a helping hand in the support ofthe schools; now six schools, with an enrollment of 350 pupils, are the result of this generous assistance." In five of the public schools she had recently visited, she said, she had found 400 pupils who had previously attended the free kindergartens, and she added, "The teachers spoke of them as being among their best pupils—and it has proved most conclusively that our claim is a just one. The better a child's mind is prepared for school, the better results you will obtain—just as any farmer will tell you never to plant your seed until the soil is well prepared."21 In Mrs. Black's mind this was an apt comparison, for she had inher­ ited her father's interest in farming. For several years following his death in 1889 she helped to manage his farm, acquiring expertise in horticul­ ture which was later to aid her as chairman of the agriculture committee of the Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs. When a group of women's clubs in Atlanta and in Georgia met to form the Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs, their melding created a mighty force of volunteer workers during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In its first twenty-five years, the Federation grew from the participation of eleven clubs with a membership of 1,000 women to over 400 clubs numbering 50,000 women. Nellie Black represented the Atlanta Free Kindergarten Association at the first organizational meeting of the Federation at the Atlanta Woman's Club, November 28, 1896. Some ofthe social issues of concern to the participants were the establishment of a reformatory for young criminals, the provision for a police matron in all jails of the state, the improvement of rural schools, and equal educational opportunities in Journal — Winter 1979

Nellie Peters Black (AHS Collections) Georgia for girls as well as boys.22 Mrs. Black served as chairman of the Federation's kindergarten committee for many years. In 1912 she reported that seventy-six kinder­ gartens had been established statewide and that a bill had been intro­ duced in that year's session of the legislature to provide for kindergartens in public schools.23 Although the bill did not pass, she continued to press for this legislation, and finally, several years after her death, public schools in Atlanta began to operate at the kindergarten level.24 Her interest in education extended to other areas. She spoke in schools and colleges during 1915 in the Federation's fight against illiter­ acy and addressed the General Assembly campaigning for a compulsory 14 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY education law which was passed in 1916. She also petitioned the Univer­ sity of Georgia for full admittance of women, which was implemented in 1919.25 When Mrs. Black accepted the presidency of the Federation in 1916, she was sixty-five years old and seemingly as energetic as ever. In 1918 in her annual review, she reported that 364 clubs were at work in the state on a variety of projects, including war relief. She began by saying that she "would like . . . to . . . take you with me through every Dis­ trict, to every town where there is an organized working club. You would soon understand what a power organized womanhood represents." The fruits of the Federation's work under her leadership were im­ pressive: clubs promoted Liberty Bonds and worked with the Red Cross to provide bandages, hospital supplies, and garments for the sick and wounded of the war. In education, the Tallulah Falls School for moun­ tain children was given financial aid; loans were arranged for students over the state; bond issues were secured for schools; and the Federation worked for medical examinations of children and the installation of school drinking fountains. In addition, ninety-three clubs participated in civic improvements, supervising parks and playground landscaping and planting 2,000 crepe myrtles "by the highways in south Georgia." It was in the area of conservation that Mrs. Black made her most noteworthy contribution to the work ofthe Federation. President Wood- row Wilson endorsed canning and preserving of foodstuffs as part of the war effort, and Federation clubs procured the services of farm demon­ stration agents to teach these skills throughout the state. To Nellie Black, ever the practical daughter of Richard Peters, there was a more important aspect to this work: Georgia at this time was spending $2 million annually for out of state food and she wanted to stop this out­ flow of money. Sponsored by the Federation, the state Department of Agriculture, and the University of Georgia, Nellie addressed eighty audiences at twelve agricultural rallies — a total of 19,128 people in a three year period. She "traveled 5,000 miles to and from different points in Geor­ gia" and "wrote fifty articles for papers in and out ofthe state" encour­ aging gardening and canning.26 President Wilson rewarded her efforts in 1917 by appointing her a "Dollar a Year" woman.27 She was still immersed in the Federation's work when death came to her at 69, on August 4, 1919, from "acute cardiac dilitation." After her funeral at All Saints Episcopal Church, she was buried with other members of her family at Oakland Cemetery.28 She had never been very far from them in life; after her return to Atlanta as a widow, she had resided at the Richard Peters home at 652 Peachtree Street until after her mother's death in 1911. Her last years were spent not very far away, at 519 Spring Street.2" Strong family feeling is evident in her last words: "Tell everybody I love them." Journal — Winter 1979 15

The Atlanta Journal, in an editorial published after her death, as­ sessed the calibre of her life in this way: . . . Hers was the rare endowment of a sympathy as wide as the needs of the rank and file, and yet as warmly tender as the love of mother for child—a keenly discerning sympathy that kept pace with the march of large events, yet never failed of cheer and comfort for the lowliest of daily griefs. This assuredly is culture at its broadest and character at its best.30

NOTES

1. The Atlanta Exposition and South Illustrated (Chicago: The Adler Art Publishing Company, 1895), p. 159. 2. Nita Black Rucker, comp., Nellie Peters Black, Pioneer (n.p.,n.d.), Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs Collection, Atlanta Historical Society. 3. Nellie Peters Black, Richard Peters, His Ancestors and Descendants (Atlanta: Foote & Davies Co., 1904), pp. 20-23. 4. Atlanta City Council minutes, 16 February 1853. 5. James C. Bonner, "Peach Industry in Ante-Bellum Georgia," The Georgia Historical Quarterly, XXXI, 4 (December, 1947): 247. 6. Black, Richard Peters, p. 26. 7. Atlanta Tax Digest, 1858. 8. Susan Elizabeth Leas, Alive in Atlanta, A History of St. Luke's Church (Atlanta: Tucker- Castleberry Printing, 1976), p. 8. 9. Charles Todd Quintard, Nellie Peters' Pocket Handkerchief and What It Saw (Sewanee, Tenn.: The University Press, 1907), Arthur Howard Noll, reprint ed. 10. In 1903 Mrs. Richard Peters joined All Saints Episcopal Church. All Saints Episcopal Church Collection, Atlanta Historical Society. 11. Reminiscences of Nellie Peters Black. Atlanta Historical Society. 12. The Atlanta Journal, 28 March 1909. 13. Black, Richard Peters, p. 28. 14. G.E. Radcliffe to Nellie Peters, 20 February 1871. Georgia Department of Archives and History. 15. Reminiscences of Mrs. Louise Black McDougald. Collection of Holy Innocents' Mission, Atlanta Historical Society. The Chapel was the forerunner of Holy Innocents' Church, located since 1954 in suburban Atlanta. 16. "Lucy" to Nellie Peters, 22 February 1877. Georgia Department of Archives and History. 17. Lillian Henderson, Roster of the Confederate Soldiers of Georgia, 1861-1865, 6 vols. (Hapeville, Ga.: Longino & Porter, 1964), 6:431. 18. Black, Richard Peters, p. 137. 19. Atlanta City Directory for 1889 (Atlanta: R.L. Polk & Co., 1889), p. 385. 20. Atlanta city directories, 1889-1897. 21. Collection of the Atlanta Kindergarten Alumnae Club. Atlanta Historical Society. 22. Rosa Woodberry, Pioneer Notes on the Foundation Period of the Georgia Federation, Silver Anniversary 1896-1921. (n.p., n.d.) 23. Year book of the Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs, 1912-1913. Atlanta Historical Society. 16 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

24. The Atlanta Constitution, 24 February 1922. Statewide provision for public pre-school educa­ tion was not implemented until 1979. 25. Rucker, Nellie Peters Black; Dorothy Orr, A History of Education in Georgia (Chapel Hill, N.C: University of North Carolina Press, 1950), p. 316. 26. Year book of the Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs, 1917-1918. 27. Rucker, Nellie Peters Black. 28. Burial permit, # 2840. Oakland Cemetery records, Atlanta Historical Society. 29. Atlanta city directories, 1889-1918. The Peters home was at 488 Peachtree Street originally; a renumbering of streets in 1892 placed it at 652 Peachtree. 30. The Atlanta Journal, 5 and 6 August 1919. She was survived by her three children: Mrs. Lamar Rucker (Nita), Mrs. John F. McDougald (Louise), and Ralph Peters. The Role of Women in Atlanta's Churches, 1865-1906

By Harvey K. Newman"

Implicit in the nature of religion in Atlanta was the belief that the well-being of the city depended upon establishing order in the com­ munity. The white Protestant churches joined with other social, eco­ nomic, and political forces to promote this goal of orderliness. At the beginning of the period the churches were places of solace and refuge in a town disrupted by the collapse ofthe Confederacy. During Reconstruc­ tion they helped conserve the pattern of segregation and white suprem­ acy. Blacks responded by forming their own churches, schools, and busi­ nesses with only token assistance from white southerners. The same concept of order also affected the role of women in the city's churches. For example, on Sunday morning, December 15, 1895, the pastor of the First Baptist Church, J. B. Hawthorne, mounted his pulpit and declared that the very foundations of the social order were threatened by the speeches and writings ofthe woman's suffrage leader, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Hawthorne reminded his congregation: . . . God would have woman erect her throne in the home. There, away from the vulgar gaze and applause of the world, the true woman wields a mightier scepter than any of her notoriety-loving sisters, who are wont to thrust themselves into every arena of public debate, and into all manner of noisy and unnatural competitions with men. The woman who builds a home in which every influence is pure, gen­ tle, sweet and elevating; a home in which Christ is a constant guest; a home whose brightness lingers upon a husband's face through all the busi­ ness and cares of the day, and to which sons and daughters return with songs of gladness, moves in a broader sphere, and does a thousand times more for the betterment of the world's condition, than any woman who spends her life in courting public attention, making political-stump speeches and delivering lectures. . . .' These sentiments were typical ofthe attitudes toward women held by the leaders of the churches. In spite of this apparent inflexibility, women joined the churches in increasing numbers. From the outset there were always more women than men in the churches of Atlanta; yet all ofthe clergymen and all ofthe lay leadership

* Assistant Dean, College of Urban Life, Georgia State University. 18 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY of the evangelical churches (such as the stewards, deacons, vestrymen, and trustees) were men. At the same time, two out of every three mem­ bers of these congregations were females. Table I shows the ratio of men to women in the membership of six Protestant churches in 1867. Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church, South had the smallest percentage of fem­ ale members (63 percent), while St. Philip's Episcopal Church had the largest percentage (71 percent). Although the number of religious organi­ zations increased from twelve in 1867 to 170 in 1906, the percentage of female members remained unchanged.2 Few women who belonged to the churches in 1867 had any occupa­ tion outside the home. A few had jobs: Elizabeth Sterchi was a school teacher and member of St. Philip's Episcopal Church, and Mrs. Eliza Johnson was a widow who owned a boarding house and belonged to Trinity Methodist Church. Most female church members remained in their homes as housekeepers and mothers. It took the extraordinary demands of wartime to bring the women of the city's churches an opportunity to form relief societies which made bandages and provided Bibles and blankets for the troops. These organi­ zations were temporary and dissolved when the war ended. The ladies' relief societies did, however, demonstrate support for the Confederacy and provided impetus for the formation of the Confederate Memorial Society. Only one year after the surrender, the ladies gathered at Oak­ land Cemetery to place flowers on the graves of the Confederate soldiers and to hear a memorial service given by Dr. Robert Q. Mallard, pastor of the Central Presbyterian Church.3 The activities of the Memorial So­ ciety as well as its predecessors, the relief societies, gave the church women little chance to develop any independence as men controlled the organizations. At the beginning of the period the role of decent women4 in white, middle and upper-class society was limited to that of the God-fearing, church-going wife and mother. However, the changing conditions of life in Atlanta during and after the war helped to modify this role of faith and submission. The large number of Negroes in the city made black domestics readily available at low cost. The introduction of store-bought food and clothing also reduced the household responsibilities of women, giving them increased amounts of leisure time. This permitted them to devote more time and energy to the most important (and socially accept­ able) outlet available to them—the church.5 As soon as a measure of prosperity returned to Atlanta, female church members began organizing their own missionary societies. Early in 1872 the secretary of the Southern Baptist Convention's Foreign Mis­ sion Board visited the city and urged Baptist women to aid their heathen sisters. In other parts of the world there were females "who were dying and none but Christian women could save them."6 Responding to his appeal, the women of the Second Baptist Church founded the Women's Journal — Winter 1979 19 Table 1 Ratio of Female to Male Mem bers In Six Atlanta Congregations, 1867 Females Males No. % No. % Wesley Chapel Methodist 233 69% 104 31% Trinity Methodist 162 63% 95 37% Second Baptist 127 65% 69 35% First Presbyterian 106 65% 56 35% Central Presbyterian 82 66% 43 34% St. Philip's Episcopal 90 71% 37 29% TOTALS : 800 66% 404 34%

Missionary and Benevolent Society in May 1873. Whatever skills the women lacked in the management of the Society were supplemented by the pastor of the church, Dr. Albert T. Spalding, and a male church member, James H. Lowe. Lowe was an insurance agent who moved to the city from New Orleans in 1871. With the pastor he helped the women draw up a constitution, elect officers, prepare reports, and collect dues which were divided equally between foreign and home missions.7 This local women's missionary society was among the first in the state, and it antedated by sixteen years the establishment of a federation which included the entire Southern Baptist Convention.8 The Methodist Episcopal Church, South created its Woman's Board of Foreign Missions at the 1878 meeting of the General Conference held at the First Methodist Church in Atlanta. The rationale for the organiza­ tion as stated in the Conference Minutes was that missionary work among women in the heathen countries could best by conducted by members ofthe same sex.9 After the Conference acted, the women ofthe two larger Methodist churches, Trinity and First, formed their own local missionary societies. Both these groups divided their resources between foreign and home mission activities.10 The seventeen women who formed the Missionary Society of the First Methodist Church were representative of the rather elite status of church members in general. Most of the women were married to men whose occupations provided not only economic security, but also a mea­ sure of status in the city. (See Table 2 for a listing of these women and the occupations of their husbands.) These women had the free time to devote to church activities; however, unlike their antebellum counter­ parts, they turned from introspective piety, giving their attention to charitable work which would build up the church at home and abroad." 20 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Table 2 Original Membership of the Women's Missionary Society of the First Methodist Episcopal Church, South—1878 Name Occupation of Husband Mrs. E. C. Moore Teacher of Greek & Latin at Atlanta high scho Mrs. James Jackson Judge, State Supreme Court Mrs. James G. McLin Sheriff, State Supreme Court Mrs. William McConnell Contractor Mrs. David G. Wylie Yardmaster, W&A Railroad Mrs. E. R. Lawshe Jewelry store owner Mrs. Robert Winship Foundry owner Mrs. W. B. Cox Wine and liquor wholesaler Mrs. M. Harralson Cigar & tobacco store owner Mrs. J. C. Courtney Bookkeeper, W&A Railroad Mrs. A. B. Phelps Bookkeeper Mrs. H. C. Leonard Bank teller Mrs. Willis Peck Plasterer Mrs. Harriet Colquitt (Widow of U.S. Senator) Mrs. Clara B. Sanders (Widow) Mrs. Fannie Kimball (Widow) Mrs. H. 0. Berry (Information not available)

One ofthe unmarried members ofthe Missionary Society was Mrs. Har­ riet Colquitt, the widow of U.S. Senator Walter T. Colquitt. After his death, Harriet Colquitt became a teacher in the Orphans' Free School and was the only member of the Missionary Society employed outside the home. While the women's Missionary Society of First Methodist, as well as those of other churches, carried on a certain amount of benevolent activity, their primary objective was evangelism. The ladies did distrib­ ute blankets, food, and clothing to needy families in the city, but it is a mistake to assume that these acts of charity were an expression of the social gospel theology. On the contrary, these organizations gave the participants an appropriate channel for the task of evangelism which dominated the religious life of the city. The women dedicated their en­ ergy and money to saving souls, bringing more people into the local churches, and financing foreign missionaries for the rescue of heathen overseas. The most socially oriented of these groups was the Trinity Home Mission Society organized by Laura Askew Haygood in 1882.n Under her leadership, the Society operated an "industrial school" to help Journal — Winter 1979 21 poor women and children earn a living by sewing. Meeting at first in a rented room and later in a house, the ladies of the church would cut out garments from bolts of cloth they had purchased. Then, two afternoons per week, the ladies received and paid for the completed work given out at the previous meeting. The only "industrial education" consisted of examing each garment, pointing out mistakes made from carelessness or ignorance, and commending good work.13 The main point of the "industrial school" is described by Laura Haygood in the "Annual Re­ port of the Trinity Methodist Church Home Mission Society": While the work is being received a young lady at the organ leads the singing of gospel hymns. Then a Bible lesson is read with very simple exposition and practical suggestions as to ways in which we may serve God in every­ day life, or the old and yet ever new story of Jesus' love is told and we pray together. Another hymn, or the doxology, closes our service, the whole not occupying more than twenty or thirty minutes. . . . After the service the work of the day is distributed.14 The piece-work sewing by the poor served to expose them to the evangeli­ cal message ofthe church. After six months there were twenty-six women and twenty-four children enrolled in the school. Their volume of work made the school almost self-sustaining. The matrons of Trinity Method­ ist hoped to encourage the poor to develop habits of industry and do a little to lift them out of chronic pauperism while bringing them into contact with Christian women.15 After the students in the "industrial school" heard the gospel mes­ sage presented by the Trinity Home Mission Society, they were not invited to join the church which had sponsored them. The elite status of the older congregations was preserved by establishing mission churches for the lower-income persons who were the objects of home mission pro­ jects. For example, Laura Haygood's Mission Society led to the estab­ lishment of St. Paul's and St. John's Methodist Churches in Atlanta.16 The process of expansion was a familiar one which began with Sunday afternoon services and Sunday school held in a rented hall. Families from the "industrial school" were encouraged to attend the services. The At­ lanta District of the Methodist Church then assigned a pastor to hold regular worship services. Finally, an independent church was estab­ lished, keeping the membership of the mother church separate from the lower-class members of the newer congregations.17 The pattern of segregating church members on the basis of economic status was evident to those who lived in the city. An appearance at church services meant dressing up in one's finest clothes in order to be presentable to the members of the church. People who lacked adequate incomes to afford "Sunday-best clothes" simply did not attend church. This kind of subtle social pressure to maintain the older religious organi­ zations' elite status is illustrated in the diary of a widow living with her four children on a meager income. In the spring of 1879 she wrote, "The 22 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Looking west from Mitchell St. toward Washington St., 1875. (L-R) Second Baptist Church, towers of Immaculate Conception, Central Presbyterian Church, and City Hall/Court House. (AHS Collections) boys [three of her children] are so unprepared for church services from my want of funds that I have to keep them at home."18 This was a recurring theme in her diary. "My children can't go to church for want of clothes. The little boys all look so well, and my little ones look so dowdy—What can I do to better their condition?"1" The writer was Emily Jane Winkler Bealer whose husband was a Baptist minister prior to his death in 1870. Her only income came from property owned by her family in Savannah, and the rental payments caused her distress by arriving late. Even in the midst of her financial difficulties, the widow indicated the importance of appearance in the worship services of Atlanta's larger churches. The diary of Emily Bealer also indicates another important role of women in the churches—to serve as role models for their children. As a mother, Mrs. Bealer felt it an obligation to attend worship services and to see that her children did, too. Sometimes her sons could not go be­ cause they lacked suits as nice as the other childrens'; and on other occasions when her money permitted the purchase of a suit for them to wear to church, the three boys would get their clothes dirty or torn and still not be able to attend.20 She laments that the boys are not saved from "so many temptations to sin" by going to church, but she is less strict in requiring their attendance than her daughter, Gertie's.21 The boys are allowed to play, but mother and daughter faithfully attend services every Journal — Winter 1979 23

Sunday. This suggests that church membership and attendance were more important for women than for men. It was a part of a proper fe­ male's role in society to take part in religious activities, so, naturally, since the daughter would be responsible for molding the values of her family someday, she was also expected to participate with her mother. This pattern of behavior helped to explain why the proportion of women church members remained over 60 percent throughout the period. During the seventies, women moved from silent listening to more independent participation in missionary societies despite the fact that such groups remained rather conservative in their emphasis upon evan­ gelism rather than social action. Between 1880 and 1890 their activities changed. Beginning on April 20, 1880, a group of women met in the basement of Trinity Methodist Church to form a local Atlanta chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).22 Their initial efforts were modest as they elected officers and spent the first few meetings in prayer. Before Christmas of 1880, a committee undertook to visit minis­ ters in the city and ask them to encourage abstinence from drinking during the holidays. Cooperation from the local clergy was encouraging, and in the spring of 1881 the Union asked the pastors to hold a series of Gospel Temperence Meetings.23 The Atlanta WCTU might have continued these conservative activi­ ties had it not been for its affiliation with the national organization. This brought to the city Frances E. Willard, president ofthe national WCTU, during her speaking tour of the South in 1881. Prior to her visit, the local members never thought of speaking in public about their cause but were instead content to influence the men who could take action in their behalf. With the example set by Miss Willard, speaking eight times in her three-day visit, members of the local Union became less afraid of public speaking for the temperance cause. They used their new-found strength to circulate a state-wide petition to the legislature urging pas­ sage of a local option prohibition law. Although this legislation failed to pass in 1881, the women of the Atlanta WCTU established a pattern of political activity that would be repeated in the years to come. If women felt stifled by their role of wife and mother, the WCTU offered an outlet for their energies which was initially endorsed by the city's largest churches. The women associated with the local WCTU in its early period were, for the most part, the wives of prosperous middle-class or affluent hus­ bands. Among them were Mrs. Jonathan Norcross, whose husband was the reform-minded mayor of Atlanta in the 1850s and then president of the Air-Line Railroad, and Mrs. Alfred H. Colquitt, whose husband was the governor of Georgia. Their status in the community assured the cooperation of many clergymen in support of both temperance and the WCTU. The most active of these ministers were Clement A. Evans, 24 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY pastor of the First Methodist Church (1880-1883) and a former general in the Confederate army, Henry McDonald ofthe Second Baptist Church (1882-1900), and Virgil Norcross, who was the son of Jonathan Norcross and pastor of the Fifth Baptist Church.24 Frequent speakers at WCTU meetings, these men opened their church buildings to the organization. Those who opposed the WCTU during its early years in Atlanta did so primarily because its national affiliation provoked the fear of northern ideas about racial equality spreading to the local members. Frances Wil­ lard was quick to allay these fears when she addressed the organizational meeting of the Georgia WCTU in Atlanta on January 11, 1883. When asked whether the work of the Union might be extended to the Negro, she replied affirmatively, adding, "It would be separate and distinct from the work among white people, and . . . the mixing of the two races in the work would not be attempted in any way whatever."25 To facilitate this pattern of segregation, the national WCTU was organized so that each state body could decide upon its own program and objectives so long as it adhered to the cause of prohibition. After the state legislature passed the local option prohibition bill in the summer of 1885, the members of the Atlanta WCTU set out to organ­ ize blacks in an attempt to win their support for a prohibition election in Fulton County. Led by Mrs. E. E. Harper, the ladies visited Negro churches and Sunday schools arguing that "low politicians and degraded white men courted their (the Negroes') favor with the bribe of whiskey" and that "they were now free and no man had the right to rob them of their personal liberty, to drink and vote for liquor."26 The appeal by the white women was only successful among black congregations such as Friendship Baptist and Big Bethel A.M.E. where the pastors, E. R. Carter and W. J. Gaines, were strong supporters of the temperance cause.27 The women of the Atlanta WCTU celebrated on the morning of November 26, 1885, when the Constitution reported that the county voted "dry" by the narrow margin of 228 votes.28 The women held daily prayer services at Trinity Methodist and First Baptist for over three weeks prior to the election.29 They held a service of thanksgiving on the morning ofthe 26th. The margin of victory came from the strong prohibi­ tion sentiment in the rural areas of Fulton County outside the city limits rather than from Atlanta itself. This situation resulted in another elec­ tion two years later which was among the most hotly contested in the city's history. Again, the WCTU was active in urging men to vote against the liquor traffic. This time their cause was taken up by the most forceful orator of the day, Henry W. Grady, who on November 17, 1887, gave his "Plea for Prohibition" in which he painted a picture of women's role in this political campaign. He said: I do not believe that women should counsel men in politics, but this ques­ tion is deeper than politics. Your wife need not tell you how to vote on the Journal — Winter 1979 25

Aerial view of corner of Walton and Forsyth Streets, 1882, showing First Methodist Church and First Baptist Church. (AHS Collections)

tariff, or on candidates, or on any political issue, but this is her election as well as yours. On this jeopardy is staked the home you builded together, the happiness you have had together, and the welfare of the little children in whose veins your blood and hers run commingled. Her stake and theirs on this election is greater than yours. Then ask her, if you have any doubt, how you should vote on that day. Now a word to the good women here. You can do great work quietly and gently in your homes for this cause and for the good of your city. You can do this work in the home circle, where no man can say you nay.30 Although most ofthe town's clergy continued to support the WCTU in its crusade against drinking, Grady responded in his speech to the sharp criticism of the anti-prohibitionists against the women of the WCTU for their involvement in the campaign. He felt the gravity of the cause justified the fact that women involved themselves openly in the election. Grady shared the almost universal nineteenth-century mascu­ line concept that a woman's place was in the home, but in this case the wives and mothers of the best families in the city were involved in the Union. He would, however, have the women pursue their work quietly and in the home rather than in the public turmoil of the campaign. Despite the efforts of Grady and the WCTU, Atlanta voted to repeal its prohibition law in November of 1887. 26 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

By the close of the decade of the 1880s, the women of Atlanta's churches had in reality advanced far beyond the ideal of the "gentle homemakers" depicted by Grady.31 Beginning with quiet devotional ac- tivites in their church missionary societies, a vanguard moved into more open political activity, supporting the prohibition cause first with peti­ tions to the state legislature and then campaigning in the local option elections of 1885 and 1887. For those involved in the Atlanta WCTU, their progress was highlighted in 1890 by the opportunity to host the national WCTU convention. Both the governor and the mayor extended the invitation for the group to meet in the city as the event provided an unprecedented chance to display southern hospitality to women.32 The visiting delegates required extensive preparations for entertainment, housing, and food. The city's most prominent evangelists, the "two Sams" (Sam P. Jones and Sam W. Small), raised funds for the expenses of the convention by taking a collection at special services held in the First Baptist Church.33 The convention opened on November 14, 1890, with over 100 dele­ gates plus other friends, family members, and fraternal representatives of other temperance organizations. Dr. John W. Heidt welcomed the ladies on behalf of the local WCTU and Trinity Methodist Church, where the convention was held. In response, the national president, Frances E. Willard, thanked the ministers of the city, especially Dr. Heidt and Dr. J. B. Hawthorne of First Baptist, as well as Governor John B. Gordon and Mayor John T. Glenn, for their support of the WCTU. Miss Willard spoke to the men ofthe way she viewed the role of women in these words: My brothers, do not misunderstand us, we are not overstepping our sphere, we are only laboring to get at one end of the line while you stand at the other, to help you lift the burdens of the world. We have been indoors enjoying the blessed protection you have given and as we lingered in selfish ease we heard the voice of a dying brother and a cry of a sister pleading for us to join hands with you in driving back the greatest enemy of the home—the legalized saloon.34 The members of the WCTU saw the problem of drinking as the source of other social problems such as poverty, crime, poor housing, and the debased condition of Negroes in the South.35 Thus, the Union established various "Departments" to deal with each of these issues. As the organiza­ tion failed (both nationally and locally) to achieve its objectives through the process of influencing the male electorate, many members also be­ came advocates of woman's suffrage. At the 1890 national convention, Mrs. Zerelda Wallace, the mother of the author of Ben Hur, Gen. Lew Wallace, delivered an address urging women to end the liquor traffic once and for all by gaining the right to vote.36 Sunday, November 16, 1890, produced the most startling feature of the WCTU national convention in Atlanta. Defying the injunction of St. Paul that women should be silent in church, forty pulpits in the city were Journal — Winter 1979 27

Photo montage of the presidents of North Avenue Presbyterian Church Women's Society, 1899- 1930 (AHS Collections) occupied by members ofthe national WCTU.37 These churches included Trinity Methodist, Big Bethel A.M.E., Sixth Baptist, the Christian Church, and First Baptist, where an ordained Congregational minister from Michigan preached before Dr. Hawthorne and the crowd of wor­ shippers.38 Speaking in the most prominent churches in the city was certainly an advancement, and it represented the culmination of years of striving by females in Atlanta's religious organizations. 28 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY After the national convention, the 150 members of the Atlanta WCTU had every reason to anticipate that their cause would prosper as a result of the meeting.39 Indeed, the following year membership in­ creased to 180, and the work of the organization appeared ready to move forward.40 It was at this point, however, that conservative reaction to the WCTU by prominent Atlanta ministers began. Among the Baptists, Dr. J.B. Hawthorne, pastor of First Baptist, and Dr. Henry McDonald, for­ mer pastor of Second Baptist and now editor of the state newspaper, The Christian Index, were both longtime advocates of prohibition as well as supporters of the WCTU. In 1892, they published articles in the Index critical of the organization and its national president, Frances Willard. On the subject of women in the ministry, they said Miss Willard was "pressing women into the gospel ministry, as preachers and leaders, contrary to the teachings of the Scriptures." In regard to woman's suf­ frage, this was an attempt "to revolutionize the social system. . . ."41 Methodist opposition came from the powerful Bishop Warren A. Candler. In what appeared a harmless report, the Temperance Commit­ tee of the North Georgia Conference ofthe Methodist Episcopal Church, South proposed a resolution to the 1892 annual conference urging cooper­ ation with the WCTU for the legal suppression of the liquor traffic.42 Bishop Candler amended the resolution to strike any endorsement ofthe organization on the ground that the WCTU favored woman's suffrage.43 Although a strong advocate of temperance, the conservative bishop would not permit the Methodist Church to ally itself with an organiza­ tion with the political involvement of the WCTU.44 Despite rebuttals by members of the state and local WCTU, the organization's influence and membership declined sharply after 1892. The role of women in Atlanta was defined more narrowly in religious organizations than it had been in 1890. Rather than serving as agents for changing the status of women in society, the religious leaders of the city again demonstrated that the church was a conserver of the values of the past. In this case women were to remain in their quiet roles as homemak- ers and as silent participants in the worship of the church. Just as those religious organizations had previously assigned Negroes a separate and inferior role in the city, the major churches in Atlanta stifled the progress of women toward equal participation in the life of an institution in which females constituted a majority of the membership. Nevertheless, changes were made in the role of females in Atlanta's churches between 1865 and 1906. Within their own separate missionary societies, women found creative outlets for their time and energy which, as long as they remained directed toward evangelism, were acceptable to the churches. Also, the members of the WCTU, even though a small percentage of the total number of women in the city's churches, gave the members of their sex a prominence and visibility as well as a voice in the churches which they had not had before.45 Even though the major Journal — Winter 1979 29 denominations in the city closed these opportunities for women after 1890, it was still possible for women to lead their own organizations. Outside the major denominations more freedom existed. Although these were "marginal" groups in terms of the number of adherents and their influence, the Christian Scientists, the Spiritualists, and the Salvation Army had women as leaders by 1900.46 This practice would not have been conceivable in 1865, and it continued to conflict with the prevailing vision of order held by the leaders and members of the city's white evangelical churches well into the twentieth century.

NOTES

1. Atlanta Constitution, 16 December 1895. Hawthorne's sermon was in response to a speech given by the eighty-year-old woman's rights leader, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, on the legal inequality of females and the publication of the Woman's Bible, which refuted Paul's teachings on the role of women in the church. 2. This is confirmed by the Census of Religious Bodies: 1906, which reported 33,302 females and 21,279 males (61 percent females) as members of religious organizations in Atlanta. 3. S.(amuel) P. Richards, Diary, 26 April 1866, Atlanta Historical Society. 4. From the outset, Atlanta had an unsavory reputation because of the presence of less decent females who inhabited notorious red light districts. 5. Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), examines the image and role of women in southern society both before and after the Civil War. 6. M. L. Brittain, ed., Semi-Centennial History of the Second Baptist Church of Atlanta, Georgia (n.p„ 1904), p. 19. 7. Ibid., pp. 19-20. 8. Scott, Southern Lady, pp. 139-40, indicates that the Southern Baptist Convention was ten years behind the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in establishing a denominational missionary organi­ zation for women. The situation in Atlanta was reversed with the women of Second Baptist receiving encouragement from a denominational official and organizing a missionary society before the local Methodists. 9. North Georgia Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Annual Conference Minutes, 1878 10. Scott, Southern Lady, suggests that the concern for home missions came after an initial period of preoccupation with foreign missions. This was not the case in Atlanta. 11. Ibid., pp. xi-xii. Scott notes the abundance of diaries and letters left by antebellum southern women in contrast to the public records created by females after the war. 12. Laura Askew Haygood was the sister of the Southern Methodist bishop, Atticus G. Haygood. Her father had founded Trinity Methodist Church in which she had grown up as a member. Laura Haygood became a school teacher as well as leader of the women's home missionary society before going to China in 1884. 13. Laura Askew Haygood, "Annual Report of the Trinity Church Home Mission Society," Wesleyan Christian Advocate, 24 April 1883. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Oswald Eugene Brown and Ana Muse Brown, Life and Letters of Laura Askew Haygood (Nash­ ville: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1904), p. 68. 30 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

17. This stratification along economic lines was reinforced later by the tendency of the older churches to move from the downtown area to the northeast where the more affluent residential neighborhoods were located. Most of these relocations took place after 1906 and helped perpetuate the pattern of class segregation. 18. Emily Jane Winkler Bealer, Diary, 9 March 1878, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta, Georgia. 19. Ibid., 16 April 1879. 20. Ibid., 16 May 1880. 21. Ibid., 26 March 1879. 22. Mrs. J.J. Ansley, History of the Georgia Woman's Christian Temperance Union, from its Organ­ ization, 1883 to 1907 (Columbus, Ga.: Gilbert Printing Co., 1914), p. 38. 23. Ibid., pp. 38-39. 24. Ibid., pp. 39, 56-57. 25. Atlanta Constitution, 12 January 1883. 26. Ansley, Georgia WCTU, p. 77. 27. Atlanta Constitution, 30 October 1885. The efforts of Carter and Gaines aroused vocal opposi­ tion by Negro anti-prohibitionists who accused them of having been "sugared" by the whites who are "using our churches to take away what little privilege the colored man has." 28. Ibid., 26 November 1885. 29. Ansley, Georgia WCTU, p. 85. 30. Edwin DuBois Shurter, ed., The Complete Orations and Speeches of Henry W. Grady (Nor­ wood, Mass.: South-West Publishing Co., 1910), p. 131. Grady was editor of the Atlanta Constitution and a prominent spokesman for the "New South." 31. Scott, Southern Lady, is correct in suggesting that the reality of women's roles in southern society preceded changes in the ideal of their roles. 32. Unfortunately for the local WCTU, both Governor John B. Gordon and Mayor John T. Glenn were replaced by the time ofthe convention, leaving the ladies without the resources ofthe city and state to host the event. They were able to do so only with considerable difficulty. See Atlanta Constitution, 1-14 November 1890. 33. Atlanta Constitution, 1 November 1890. 34. Ansley, Georgia WCTU, pp. 129-30. 35. See the report of Miss Willard's speech in Atlanta Constitution, 7 November 1890. Not only was alcohol responsible for the condition of blacks in the South, Miss Willard says, it also caused the ruin of the recent immigrants who crowded into the cities of the North. 36. Atlanta Constitution, 17 November 1890. 37. Ibid., 16-17 November 1890. 38. Ansley, Georgia WCTU, pp. 130-31; and Atlanta Constitution, 16-17 November 1890. 39. Official membership rolls or statistics indicating the size of the WCTU in Atlanta prior to 1900 are not extant. Atlanta Constitution, 15 November 1890, gives the membership at the time ofthe national convention as 150. This represents the membership in two Unions in Atlanta since a black WCTU was organized in 1887. 40. Ansley, Georgia WCTU, p. 134. 41. Ibid., p. 140. 42. North Georgia Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Annual Conference Minutes, 1892. 43. Wesleyan Christian Advocate, 28 December 1892. 44. Ibid. 45. One can only estimate the number of females in Atlanta's seventy-two religious organizations in 1890. Certainly there were more than 10,000, while there were only 150 WCTU members in 1890. 46. Atlanta City Directory, 1900, p. 1567. "Not a Veneer or a Sham": The Early Days at Agnes Scott

By Amy Friedlander*

The tree-shaded, green lawns and brick and stone building of Agnes Scott College epitomize the idea of a small, selective, private women's college. Agnes Scott, which presently enrolls some six hundred women, was founded in 1889 to meet the needs of Decatur, Georgia, a small community six miles east of Atlanta's Five Points. Under the leadership of the Reverend Frank Henry Gaines, pastor of the Decatur Presbyterian Church, and several leading citizens of the Atlanta-Decatur area who were members of his congregation, the Decatur Female Institute opened its doors in September 1889 to four teachers, sixty-three girls, and seven little boys. In the relatively short span of less than twenty years, Agnes Scott evolved from this grammar school to an institute (a type of junior college) to a four-year college, which became the first in Georgia to be accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. The Decatur Female Institute was another in a succession of private schools for girls that Decatur's citizens patronized in addition to a public school. At different times, the Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopal denom­ inations had run the school in the 1880s. During the academic year 1888- 1889, Kate Hillyer had supervised the academy, but at the conclusion of the spring term, Atlanta hired her for a position in its growing public school system. Gaines then decided to seize this opportunity to establish a Presbytrian school for girls in Decatur. The Presbyterian school for girls in Rome, Georgia, had closed from 1864 to 1871, and since 1886 it had suffered from competition with the local public school there. Presbyteri­ ans across the state lagged behind both Methodists and Baptists in the number of institutions and in the size of financial support that the synod provided. Faced with this relatively sad state of affairs, Gaines linked the school with his church although he never received formal support or encouragement from the synod for his project.1 The ties remained infor­ mal, made visible by requirements that the board of trustees consist of members ofthe Presbyterian Church (U.S.) and the active participation in the school's life of prominent civic leaders who were members of

Visiting assistant professor of history, Agnes Scott College. 32 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY Gaines's flock. With time, daughters of many of Atlanta's leading fami­ lies together with young women from across the Deep South and the Border States attended the institute, thus contributing to the school's expanding significance. In the summer of 1889 Gaines was still a relative newcomer to Decatur. He had been ordained in Virginia two years earlier, and before he was called to Decatur in September 1888, he had become convinced that the extension of Christianity was linked to the systematic Christian training of girls to be wives and mothers. His social experiment at Agnes Scott was an application of his religious principles. He believed that Christian work consisted ofthe use of talents and opportunities, because God's gifts, in the form of talents and abilities, represented divine re­ quirements. Women, he felt, were the principal vehicles for spreading the Word of God, and he became fond of repeating the words of a fellow pastor as an inspiration: "The conversion to Christ of a girl probably means a Christian home and a Christian mother, and the starting of Christian influences for generations."2 Following the example of other denominational colleges and schools, the Decatur Female Institute was evangelically Christian, but not sectar­ ian in order to broaden its base of public support. Denominational col­ leges depended upon students' tuition to meet operating expenses, and thus, they resented newer, secular institutions which competed for their clientele. As a result, proponents of religious education emphasized the importance of mental discipline and the old-fashioned, liberal curricu­ lum for the formation of a well-rounded character. The idea of mental discipline served the cause of religiously-oriented education. Education was seen as the process of character formation rather than the acquisition of a set of skills or insights, and studying academic subjects was consid­ ered training. The content of Latin, Greek, mathematics, and moral philosophy was not considered valuable in itself, and the curriculum, in the final analysis, represented sets of intellectual calisthenics. Christian principles infused it and supplied its purpose and meaning. Inadequate funding plagued women's colleges even more severely than men's. Gaines never convinced the Presbyterian Synod of Georgia to contribute to his project, and northern financial support was directed toward black education through, for example, the Peabody Fund. State officials tended to be reluctant to pass extensive measures for aid to education because it affected taxation, and Bourbon Democrats, who dominated state and local politics in the latter decades ofthe nineteenth century, regularly campaigned on the promise of maintaining low taxes. Educators, including Wilbur Fisk Tillett of Vanderbilt University and Methodist bishop Atticus Haygood, who was eventually president of Emory University, then located in Oxford, called upon New South busi­ nessmen to plow back into southern education some of the fruits of their material prosperity. Emory College found one such benefactor in Asa Journal — Winter 1979 33

afttajP' *?.. George W. Scott Fertilizer Mills, 1890 (AHS Collections)

Griggs Candler, and the Decatur Female Institute discovered another in George Washington Scott. Scott was a transplanted Pennsylvanian who had fought for the Confederacy as a colonel before he made a fortune in fertilizers. He and his family moved to Decatur from Savannah in 1877, and he soon became active in the Presbyterian Church and in municipal government. Feeling that the Lord had smiled on his business and provided his prosperity, Scott decided in 1890 to donate $40,000 to build a permanent home for the Decatur Female Institute which had been meeting in a rented, white frame house. He made one condition—that the school be renamed Agnes Scott Institute in honor of his mother. After touring college campuses in the North, he realized that he could not provide a similar building for the proposed gift; ultimately, Main Building cost $112,250, then the largest gift in the history of education in Georgia. The three-hour dedica­ tion held on November 12, 1891, in the presence of the entire Presby­ terian Synod of Georgia attracted three thousand people. Scott's benefi­ cence moved Bishop Warren Akin Candler to declaim: I have thought of you as joining hands with the almighty power, which, thousands of years ago in preparing this world for the habitation of men, slew hecatombs of beasts and creeping things, and hid their bones under the soil of Florida that those rich deposits might, in these distant centuries, so fertilize the earth as to soften the rigor ofthe sons of Adam, and multiply seed for the sower and bread for the eater. Thither have you gone and exhumed them and turned them into a vitalizing power which makes the harvest fields of the South wave in double beauty and plenteous- ness. . . . You have looked deeper than secret treasures and wider than waving harvests to find the meaning of life and the purpose of God in the ages which have gone before and the years which are yet to come. You 34 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

have found in the soul of man the goal to which nature has tended from the beginning, and with the rewards of your labor you sought to develop the hidden resources of mind and enhance the beauty of that fairest growth under Southern skies—Southern womanhood.3 Scott had taken an active interest in the welfare of the new school from its inception, and, together with Charles M. Candler, he obtained a charter for the school from the Superior Court of DeKalb County dur­ ing the summer of 1889. His philanthropy and enthusiasm for the insti­ tute did not end after his enormous gift. The institute had been funded by issuing stock valued at $5,350 to thirty-five prominent citizens of Atlanta and Decatur. This was a common method of financing schools and other community endeavors, such as small textile mills, but many educators felt that the practice hampered the development of education because investors interfered with the operation of the school. In the 1890s, Gaines convinced Scott that dependence upon people outside the institute was detrimental to it, and Scott, already the largest single shareholder, accordingly bought up the outstanding sixty-seven shares. He then turned the capital over to a self-perpetuating board of trustees who amended the charter to stipulate that only members of the Presby­ terian Church (U.S.) might be elected to it. Until his death in 1903, Scott made up deficits in the annual budget. Although he did not leave an income-producing endowment, his gift of buildings and land, compara­ ble to holdings of the leading northern women's colleges, gave the insti­ tute the semblance of permanence, and his generosity during his lifetime freed Agnes Scott from complete dependence upon student tuition for operating expenses, enabling it to develop academically in an atmos­ phere of relative economic security. Scott's choice of his mother as the inspiration for his gift coincided with Gaines's Christian perception ofthe institute and its function. The strict differentiation between social roles for men and women that char­ acterized Victorian culture was especially strong in the South where women represented the guardians of white supremacy, and Scott's and Gaines's shared vision struck a responsive chord in souther society which prided itself on traditions of genteel womanhood. In 1891, Tillet eulogized the antebellum southern lady who excelled in native womanly modesty, in neatness, grace and beauty of person, in ease and freedom without boldness of manner, in refined and cultivated minds, in gifts and qualities that shone brilliantly in the social circle, in spotless purity of thought and character, in laudable pride of family and devotion to home, kindred, and loved ones.4 The woman was not only the most important symbol of the Old South, but in the hardships of Civil War and Reconstruction it was the heart, the hope, the faith of Southern womanhood that set Southern men to working when the war was over, and in this work, they Journal — Winter 1979 35

led the way, filling the stronger sex with utter amazement at the readiness and power with which they began to perform tasks to which they had never been used before.5 One representative of the older, prewar generation lamented the contemporary decline in southern chivalry, and other observers of the South found it less usual for southern men to support all of their depen­ dent female relatives. Instead, impoverished southern women went to work, frequently as teachers. This was consistent with national trends which saw women working in increasing numbers out of economic neces­ sity. Teaching, which required more years of preparation, was for women a profession of high status and, therefore, attractive to aspiring daughters of the lower classes as well as to daughters of newly impover­ ished genteel families. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the percentage of women in the total teaching population moved from 66.3 percent in 1870 to 73.4 percent in 1900." The Reverend Amory Dwight Mayo, a Unitarian minister who turned himself into a specialist in southern education and became widely respected by northerners and southerners, believed that the entrance into the teaching force of young women from the best families had significantly raised the quality of education and was partly responsible for the revival in southern edu­ cation in the 1880s and 1890s. This revival of interest consisted of the establishment of graded public schools in the cities and common schools in rural regions. Indirectly, it fostered higher education for women by creating a demand for teachers and by ultimately providing better- qualified applicants. Although some saw the traditional image of southern women crum­ bling, others felt that the ideal itself impeded the cause of women's higher education. By 1900, the experience of northeastern women's col­ leges had demonstrated women's mental and physical abilities to with­ stand the strains of collegiate education; the question became whether women ought to have the same type of education as men. Since southern­ ers tended to be more conservative in their attitudes toward women in general, it is not surprising to find John McBryde of Sweet Briar Institute writing in 1907 that education which fills a woman's soul with foolish notions of a glorious independence apart from man and apart from home is . . . perni­ cious. ... It can never be too strongly emphasized or too often repeated that home is the center of woman's influence and the source of her power, and the instruction in every subject of study should be directed with that important fact in view.7 McBryde's was hardly a typical response, however, and women who led the movement for greater educational opportunities for women had other ideas. M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr, emphatically advo­ cated equality for women and men in all spheres, including education. 36 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY Enthusiastically, she embraced the idea of competition between quali­ fied women and men, but the spectre of competition between the sexes raised precisely the same threats to conventions about the appropriate role of women that McBryde's assurances sought to allay. While Celestia S. Parrish, professor at Randolph-Macon Woman's College and co- founder with Elizabeth Avery Colton of the Southern Association of Col­ lege Women in 1903, also viewed the popular notion of The Southern Lady with disfavor, she never envisioned men and women in competition with each other. She and other conservative advocates of better educa­ tion for women saw them in permanently complementary roles and reas­ sured their audience that expanded opportunities in education would not lead to expanded political participation.8 Maintaining high academic standards was a constant problem for southern schools, and local boosterism led principals to christen institu­ tions "colleges" where there was little to substantiate the claim. The Southern Association of College Women was eventually formed to elimi­ nate the stigma ofthe "so-called Southern colleges for women" by estab­ lishing a code of standards and then ranking southern institutions. The association published its findings in an effort to influence public opin­ ion.9 Paradoxically, institutions likeAgnes Scott which called themselves institutes or seminaries were more likely to maintain high academic standards for both faculty and students than were the "colleges." Although the founders of Agnes Scott did not expound at length on their philosophy of education, the development of the school illustrated an idea of education that was philosophically conservative regarding the role of women and yet adovcated a course of study as rigorous as that designed for men. Next to the home, read the Annual Catalogue and Announcement of 1889-1890, the institute's administrators believed that the school was the most important formative influence upon a young girl. Agnes Scott Institute was founded to promote "the glory of God in the higher education of young women." God had assigned to them a sphere of "inexpressible importance to the welfare of Church and State."10 The purpose of the institute was to educate girls to perform their divinely ordained function, and such training required the finest education, "an education which would carefully guard and promote . . . physical devel­ opment; which would give thorough mental training and furnishing; which would give that refinement and those accomplishments which adorn womanhood; and which, above all, would form and develop the highest type of character." For its curriculum, the institute took as its model the "leading institutions of the land" that prescribed for young ladies a course of study "as liberal as that prescribed in the leading male colleges."" The result was patent irony. On the one hand, the institute justified its policies by promising to uphold more perfectly the woman's traditional role as wife and mother. Yet the curriculum that effected its end presumed the equality of male and female intellectual capabilities Journal — Winter 1979 37 and thus subtly undermined the differentiation between the sexes that the school's rationale promised to support. By 1890 the courses at Agnes Scott Institute were arranged in eight schools according to the organization employed by the University of Vir­ ginia: English, Mathematics, Natural Science, Mental and Moral Phi­ losophy, Bible, History, and Modern Languages. There were two princi­ pal additions to this structure. A normal department to train girls for careers in teaching was organized in 1896, and instruction in Greek began in 1897, thus completing the classic liberal curriculum.12 Up to this time, conventional wisdom held that women's intelligence was not of suffi­ ciently strong quality to undertake the study of Greek, so including it in the program of study signifies the administrators' faith in their students' abilities, despite popular belief. The changes that took place at Scott between 1890 and 1907 when it was admitted to the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools lay in its organization of both students and academic subjects and in the expansion and sophistication of the faculty. In the first years, administrators did not distinguish levels of competence among the stu­ dents by organizing them into the modern system of classes. Instead, the students individually met the requirements of the different schools and accumulated a sufficient number of certificates of proficiency to qualify for a degree in either the classical, literary, scientific, or normal courses. In its second year, the institute's preparatory department was set apart from academic subjects leading to a degree. For the session 1896-1897, the school was divided into departments rather than schools, and in 1898 students were organized into freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior classes according to their level of competency and achievement. The institute, formally renamed and rechartered Agnes Scott College during the 1905-1906 session, applied for admission to the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools during that academic year. The asso­ ciation refused Agnes Scott admission at that time because there was not sufficient differentiation between the college and the preparatory depart­ ment, thereafter designated Agnes Scott Academy. As a result of the association's decision, the college's faculty did not teach in the academy, and when the second building, Rebekah Scott Hall, was completed in 1906, the college occupied the new building and left the academy in Main. The college then reapplied to the association and was accredited in 1907. Agnes Scott represented the fifteenth college admitted to the association since its creation in 1905, the fourth women's college thus recognized, and the first college in Georgia to join the association. Changes in the composition of the faculty reflected increasing so­ phistication and curriculum diversity as well as Gaines's policy of adding more difficult courses each year and deleting elementary material.13 When the Decatur Female Institute opened, two teachers, Nannette Hopkins and Mattie Cook, divided the academic subjects between them. The following year, Hopkins taught mathematics and history in the new 38 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY institute, and Cook became principal of the preparatory department. Gaines himself taught the Bible course, and new teachers covered mental and moral philosophy, Latin, French, English literature, elocution, and chemistry. Over the next years the faculty continued to increase in size and specialization. Teachers were called upon to teach fewer subjects, and gradually certain disciplines, such as mathematics, were refined into elementary and advanced levels. Refinement of the curriculum went hand in hand with hiring more highly qualified teachers. H. B. Arbuckle was the first member of the faculty to hold a doctorate; he arrived in 1897 to teach science. In in­ creasing numbers, men and, more signficantly, women with advanced degrees in subject specialties came to Decatur to teach in the growing institute. Maud Morrow, who taught Greek at Agnes Scott from 1897 to 1905, was the first woman to graduate from the University of Mississippi, where she also took a master's degree. The first woman on the faculty with a doctorate was also a classicist; Lillian S. Smith, who finished her Ph.D. at Cornell, replaced Morrow in 1905. From the outset Gaines had hired the most highly qualified people the school could afford. Frequently these were ambitious young women who took a year or two off in the course of their studies to earn some money teaching at Agnes Scott, or, with time, they were women who may have found it easier to obtain a college teaching position at a women's institution than at coeducational or men's colleges and universities. Hop­ kins, for example, had graduated from Hollins Institute in Virginia and had planned to complete her education at Bryn Mawr. She came to Decatur expecting to stay only a year before resuming her own educa­ tion.14 Louise McKinney, who taught at Agnes Scott from 1891 to 1937, completed the course of study at the State Teachers College, Farmville, Virginia, which did not confer degrees. She then studied at Vassar and planned to finish there before she came to Agnes Scott, lured probably by the relatively high salary of $800 a year.15 Increasing attention to professional qualifications was part of the institute's crusade for high standards, but financial and social considerations stemming from the nature of single-sex education almost unwittingly created an outlet for the new, highly-educated women that the movement for improved women's educational opportunities was itself training. Gaines believed that the teachers set the tone of the college, and to realize his ideal of a Christian college for women, he considered it neces­ sary for the faculty to be members of an "evangelical Christian" sect.16 Relations between faculty and students were very close, and the women teachers in particular supervised the girls' extracurricular activities as well as their studies and behavior. Main Building consisted of four floors; the first housed classrooms and offices, and the fourth held the art stu­ dio, music rooms, and rooms in which the girls held their clubs and meetings. Boarding students lived on the second and third floors along Journal — Winter 1979 39

View of Agnes Scott College, 1915 (AHS Collections) with the resident women teachers. Asked in 1957 what Scott was like in the "Gay '90s," Louise McKinney remembered that "it was more like a family."17 The institute encouraged this cozy environment to overcome paren­ tal reluctance in sending daughters away from home. Indeed, Agnes Scott Institute's Annual Catalogue and Announcement of 1891-1892 in­ formed prospective patrons that "every effort is made to give the Insti­ tute the character of a home and to cause the pupils to feel at home"; and the seal which ornamented the first diplomas conferred at Agnes Scott contained the phrase, "A Home for Young Ladies."18 A corollary to the strict segregation between male and female social roles, which identified women with hearth and home, was the desire to keep daugh­ ters protectively at home while their brothers went off to school. Coedu­ cation was unpopular in the South, and as men's universities reluctantly began to admit women, administrators maintained as much social segre­ gation as possible. When Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennes­ see, annexed the Lebanon College for Young Ladies, for example, its bulletin assured parents that young women would have full advantage of the university's faculty and curriculum but there would be no mixing with the male university students.19 Boarders' rooms at Agnes Scott were furnished with ruffled curtains, rugs, and heavy, late-Victorian furniture instead of more institutional items, and although girls shared rooms, they were probably accustomed 40 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY to doing so at home. In addition to duplicating the physical environment of the home, the institute offered spiritual security in its heavily Protes­ tant orientation and social protection by an ever-vigilant faculty and long lists of rules. Prohibitions included snacking at night; wearing thin, low shoes during cold months or inclement weather; going out without wraps and overshoes; sitting on the ground; walking outdoors without a scarf or hat; "and the too early removal of flannels or any neglect to put them on at the approach of cold weather."20 Parents of Scott students were the most serious violators of the institute's rules. Bulletin after bulletin requested them not to excuse their daughters from examinations or to take them home before the end of the term. Parents living in the vicinity of Atlanta were asked not to permit their children to come home for weekends because "these weekly visits decidedly demoralize and distract the large number of pupils who cannot visit their homes."21 Nonetheless, Gaines learned that as soon as his boarding students had settled down to study, letters would arrive from their parents asking that the girls might be sent home for a brief vacation. Finally, box after box of forbidden treats arrived regularly despite the bulletins' emphatic prohibition: "OUR TABLE IS ABUN­ DANTLY SUPPLIED WITH WHOLESOME FOOD, AND BOXES OF EATABLES ARE FORBIDDEN. PLACING BEFORE YOUR DAUGH­ TER A TEMPTATION TO EAT RICH FOOD AT ALL HOURS IS A MOST EFFECTUAL MEANS OF DEFEATING ALL THE ENDS FOR WHICH THEY HAVE BEEN SENT TO US."22 Parental disregard for Agnes Scott's rules undermined the institute's authority over its students. Mental discipline, having the development of character as its purpose, required not only the regulation of the mind through the mental exercises of Greek vocabulary and algebra, but also entailed appropriately-monitored extracurricular participation. Stu­ dents were graded in deportment on a scale of 1-100 in precisely the same manner they were graded in their academic subjects. The teachers pro­ tected the girls by overseeing their daily walks and bicycle trips and organized their extracurricular hours by initiating the Mneumosynean Literary Society, the Plymnean Club for music, the Crow Quill Club (for pen-and-ink sketching), the art society, and a string of other clubs and activities ranging from cooking and embroidery to intramural basketball. Parents, though appreciative of the school's security, apparently did not sympathize with either its insistence upon academic standards or its philosophy of education realized through these social regulations. Flout­ ing rules was not conducive to the formation of Christian character, but most parents, unconcerned with the effects of their indulgence, preferred merely to send their daughters away for a year to be "finished" before they were married. The institute's first successful year and Scott's huge donation at­ tracted a great deal of attention, and the session 1890-1891 saw an enroll- Journal — Winter 1979 41

Agnes Scott students, c. 1905 (AHS Collections) ment of 138 girls, more than twice the size of the student body the preceding year. Nearly all were poorly prepared academically and not psychologically prepared to uphold the high standards upon which Gaines insisted. Enrollment increased to 292 in 1891-1892 and then dropped to 205 in 1899-1900. It climbed to 301 in 1905-1906; by then, the majority of the students were boarding rather than day students. The turnover in students in the first years was rapid; by 1904, only sixty-two had qualified for a degree, which required four years of classwork exclud­ ing any studies completed in the preparatory department. Hopkins re­ membered that finding students with adequate preparation was a serious problem in the early years and credited Gaines with foresignt and cour­ age in maintaining somewhat unpopular policies until secondary schools began to prepare students to meet Agnes Scott's entrance requirements.23 The criteria for admission to Agnes Scott in 1905 required that an applicant be at least fifteen, that she present testimonials of her good character, and that she have had English, Latin, algebra through quad­ ratic equations, and either a modern language or Greek. In addition, she had to have an elective in Greek, Greek and Roman history, physiology, botany, or physics. In order to graduate, a student had to complete two years of English, two years of mathematics, two years of history, two years of Bible study, one year of psychology, one year of chemistry, one year of physics, and one year of ethics. Each course lasted one year rather than one semester, and each student was required to plan a year-long 42 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY program consisting of fifteen credit-hours. Beyond the core curriculum required for graduation, a student could choose electives from mathe­ matics, English, astronomy, modern and ancient languages, and biology; no academic credit was given for music and art. Students in the 1890s could turn "a pretty verse," Louise McKinney recalled, but their teach­ ers taught them to write term papers. Surveying his years with Scott, Gaines remarked that the school had given its students high educational standards, "something real and true, not a veneer or a sham." Not everyone appreciated his principles. "We had an awful reputation for overworking the girls," McKinney commented. "Mothers thought we were ruining their daughters' health."24 Not only did the girls' academic training resemble that of their brothers, but their activities were also similar and fostered independ­ ence. By 1900 they published an annual for which they solicited adver­ tisements from local merchants, and shortly thereafter they began a literary magazine. Students were elected officers of their classes and of the gamut of extracurricular groups. The predominantly female faculty, moreover, presented them with an alternative model to that of their mothers. Occasionally, a graduate of the institute returned to teach there, thus underlining the implication that studies at Scott could lead into new endeavors. Anna Irwin Young, for example, graduated from Agnes Scott Institute, studied at the University of Chicago, and came back to Scott to assist in the mathematics department in 1897. She eventually finished a degree at Columbia University.25 The annual and the literary magazine are filled with stories and essays that explicitly and obliquely describe life at Agnes Scott and reveal students' ambitions and daydreams. A "Prophecy" written for the 1897 annual, Aurora, saw the institute's graduates as physicians and lawyers, missionaries and teachers, administrators and musicians. The sketch envisioned two former companions, Lily Little and Anna Wiley, as bitter enemies campaigning for President on the Republican ticket, both to be defeated by the Democrats' candidate, Ada Hooper. More projections saw one classmate as a conductor on an Atlanta streecar, another a book-agent, and one—Alice Barker—as mayor of Utopia.26 Mixed with the fantastical elements are some startling, astute insights. It was quite natural for a southerner to identify with political victory by Democrats and wrangling with Republicans but rather surprising to find this in a publication that editorialized against woman suffrage and showed absolutely no political consciousness. On a less conscious level, the choice of professions in which women had always participated or were beginning to enter (e.g., law and medicine) suggests that alternatives to motherhood were becoming attractive possibilities. A few of the early graduates of the institute still corresponded with the College Alumnae Association in 1923. The Annual Register that year listed a handful who were involved in church activities and who had not Journal — Winter 1979 43 married. Ora Hopkins, a graduate of the class of 1895, was a pastor's assistant in Staunton, Virginia. Her classmate Margaret Laing worked in the United States Veterans Hospitals. Lily Wade Little, an alumna of 1897, was a supervisor of grammar grades in the Bibb County, Georgia, public schools before leaving to marry. Cora Strong, another alumna who had graduated in 1897, attended North Carolina State College for Women and had spent her last vacation studying mathematics and as­ tronomy. Rosa Belle Knox, ofthe class of 1899, had become an assistant professor of education and was director of primary work in the Edgewood School, Greenwich, Connecticut. Her classmate Mary Elizabeth Jones taught public school in Decatur where she was an active member of the Parent-Teacher Association.27 For those who did not marry, teaching and full-time church work were viable alternatives consistent with women's traditional sphere of influence, although these pursuits represented an expansion of their ac­ tivities beyond the confines of the home. While attending Scott, few students seriously envisioned a career in teaching, the only professionally-oriented program in the institute. Of the sixty-two who graduated by 1904, only eight chose to enroll in the normal department. The remainder took the literary or classical programs which were more perfectly attuned to the intellectual atmosphere than the job-oriented normal department. At the turn of the century, Agnes Scott was hardly in the vanguard of radical feminism. It did, however, suggest modest alternatives for ambitious young women, and its course of study encouraged students to take their intellectual abilities seriously. This may represent only a small step in the eyes of a feminist of 1980, but it signifies a substantive departure from the pretentious, so-called "Southern colleges for women" whose students dabbled in French, needlework, and watercolors. Gaines's justification for excellence—Christian motherhood—reinforced conservative attitudes toward women's social role. Yet, the liberal curric­ ulum that was the mainstay of the education of a pious wife and mother quietly undermined prejudices against socially active women.

NOTES

1. For the early history of Agnes Scott College, see Frank Henry Gaines, The Story of Agnes Scott College (Atlanta, Ga.: Agnes Scott College, n.d.). 2. As quoted in Ibid., pp. 62-63. 3. Warren Akin Candler, "Another Christian College in the South," in Dedicatory Exercises of the Agnes Scott Institute, 12 November 1891, pp. 34-35. 44 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

4. Wilbur Fisk Tillett, "Southern Womanhood as Affected by the War," The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, n.s., 21 (1891-1892): 9. 5. Ibid., p. 10. 6. U.S., Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau ofthe Census, Statistics of Women at Work (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1907), pp. 109, 113, 120. 7. John M. McBryde, "Womanly Education for Woman," Sewanee Review 5 (1907): 479. 8. For representative essays by Parrish and Thomas, see their articles in vols. 21 and 22 of the Educational Review. 9. Elizabeth Avery Colton, "Various Types of Southern Colleges for Women," Southern Association of College Women Bulletin, No. 2 (1913): 3-4. 10. Second Annual Catalogue and Announcement of Agnes Scott Institute, 1889-1890, p. 6. 11. Ninth Annual Catalogue and Announcement of Agnes Scott Institute, p. 14. 12. Information on changes in the curriculum is taken from the Annual Catalogues. 13. Information on the composition of the faculty is taken from the Annual Catalogues. 14. V. A. Sydenstricker, "Dr. Frank Henry Gaines and Agnes Scott College," unpublished types­ cript in James Ross McCain Library, Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia, p. 45. 15. DeKalb (Ga.) News, 12 December 1962, n.p. 16. F. H. Gaines, The College Woman (Louisville, Ky.: Executive Committee of the Christian Education and Ministerial Relief of the Presbyterian Church of the United States, n.d.), p. 12. 17. Agnes Scott News, 23 January 1957, p. 23. 18. Agnes Scott Alumnae Quarterly 54 (1976): 12. 19. Charles Foster Smith, "The Higher Education of Women in the South," Educational Review 8 (1894): 287-90. 20. Third Annual Catalogue, p. 16. 21. Fourth Annual Catalogue, p. 16. 22. Tenth Annual Catalogue, p. 89. 23. Sydenstricker, "Dr. Frank Henry Gaines," p. 45. 24. Atlanta Constitution, 20 December 1961, p. 23. 25. Gaines, Story of Agnes Scott College, p. 33. 26. "Prophecy," Aurora 2 (1897): 137-39. 27. "Annual Register," Agnes Scott Alumnae Quarterly 1 (1923): 19-20. Woman Suffrage Actiuities in Atlanta

By A. Elizabeth Taylor"

Historically speaking, Georgia can hardly be called a "woman's rights" state. For more than a century, the franchise was restricted to males. Only reluctantly were women granted the right to vote and hold office. When the federal woman suffrage amendment was submitted in 1919, Georgia was the first state to reject it. Even after the amendment's ratification in August 1920, Georgia continued to resist and was one of two states that refused to allow women to cast ballots in the general election in November.1 Not until almost fifty years later did the legisla­ ture ratify the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. In spite of Georgia's impressive record of opposition, the state was not without its suffrage crusade. The movement seems to have begun in Columbus with the formation of the Georgia Woman Suffrage Associa­ tion in 1890. Its president was H. Augusta Howard, and its original membership consisted of Miss Howard, her mother, and her four sisters. The Association soon had members in several parts ofthe state. The first Atlanta women who joined were Mrs. Kate Mallette Hardwick and Mrs. Mary Latimer McLendon. In March 1894 an equal suffrage league was organized in Atlanta. This league was an affiliate of the Georgia Association and began with a membership of forty men and women.2 In 1894 the small but ambitious Georgia Association invited the National American Woman Suffrage Association to hold its next annual convention in Atlanta. This organization had never met in the South, and many feared that a convention there would be poorly attended. The Georgia suffragists assured the doubters that Atlanta would receive them hospitably and predicted that DeGive's Opera House would be "packed from ceiling to pit." Many would probably come to laugh, they admitted, but some would leave as converts to the cause. The persuasiveness ofthe Georgia women prevailed, and Atlanta became the official choice for the next annual meeting.3 NAWSA's 1895 convention was the first large assemblage of suffrag­ ists ever held in the South. Among those attending were ninety-three delegates from twenty-eight states and a large number of visitors from

* Professor of history at Texas Woman's University, Denton, Texas. 46 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY many parts of the nation. Ministers of different denominations opened the meetings with prayer, and prominent local citizens welcomed the visitors to Atlanta and to the South. There was much local interest, and all sessions were well-attended.4 The most outstanding person at the convention was the Associa­ tion's president, Susan B. Anthony. Then approaching her seventy-fifth birthday, Miss Anthony was a veteran of many decades of crusading. Also attending was sixty-seven year old Anna Howard Shaw, who had earned degrees in both theology and medicine, but who had won fame as an orator and crusader for temperance and women's rights. Among the younger women the most important was thirty-six year old Carrie Chap­ man Catt, a highly competent campaigner who stressed the importance of careful organization and planning.5 The most outstanding of the southern women was forty-five year old Laura Clay of Kentucky. The daughter of Cassius M. Clay, Laura had been active in suffrage work on both the state and national levels and, as chairman of NAWSA's South­ ern Committee, had done much to promote the cause in the South. Other southern suffrage leaders present were Ella C. Chamberlain of Florida, Lide A. Meriwether of Tennessee, Caroline E. Merrick of Louisiana, Josephine K. Henry of Kentucky, Virginia Durant Young of South Caro­ lina, Elizabeth Lyle Saxon of Louisiana, and H. Augusta Howard and Mary Latimer McLendon of Georgia. The convention's morning and afternoon sessions were devoted to committee reports and other business. The evening sessions featured addresses describing the progress of women and extolling the justice of their demands. Robert R. Hemphill of South Carolina stated that their cause was advancing in spite of centuries of prejudice against it. Henry C. Hammond of Georgia refuted the contention that voting was not in "woman's sphere." He doubted that woman had a "sphere," but if she did, voting should certainly be in it. Josephine K. Henry of Kentucky said that women were fighting for their freedom with "no weapon save argument and no wealth save the justice of their cause." Susan B. An­ thony noted that one of the nation's two equal suffrage states now had three women in its legislature.6 "I know that there are men who will say it is a shame," she observed. But, she continued, in the minds of such men "it is no disgrace for women to keep the legislative hall in order, to clean the spittoons and to keep the dust from settling on the floor. . . ." It is only when they sit in the legislature and vote that objection is made.7 On Sunday in DeGive's Opera House an audience of two thousand people heard Anna Howard Shaw challenge the argument that women's rights were in conflict with nature. She said: "We ask for nothing which God can not give us. God created nature, and if our demands are contrary to nature, trust nature to take care of herself without the aid of man."8 On Monday the Atlanta Equal Suffrage League sponsored a mass meet­ ing over which Susan B. Anthony presided. Miss Anthony told her listen- Journal — Winter 1979 47 ers that the aim of the suffrage movement was to dignify woman and to give her "that respectability and influence to which she is entitled." Without the ballot she has "to beg for every crumb she gets."9 Several other women also spoke, and the League gained thirty-four new mem­ bers. It was generally agreed that the Atlanta convention was a highly successful one. The visitors had been cordially received, and many had been entertained in the homes of local citizens. The newspapers had published daily reports of their activities. Only one Georgia paper's edi­ torial endorsed woman suffrage, however—the Sunny South, a weekly published in Atlanta and edited by Col. Henry Clay Fairman.10 Later in 1895, H. Augusta Howard resigned as president ofthe Geor­ gia Association. She was succeeded by Mrs. Frances Carter Swift of Atlanta, who after several months was succeeded by Mrs. McLendon. In November 1899 the Association sponsored a two-day convention in At­ lanta. Its evening sessions were held in the hall of the House of Repre­ sentatives, and addresses were delivered by both Georgia and out-of- state women. Some ofthe speakers were Mrs. Gertrude Clanton Thomas and Mrs. Frances Carter Swift of Atlanta, Mrs. Claudia Howard Max­ well of Columbus," Mrs. Virginia D. Young of South Carolina, and Miss Frances E. Griffin of Alabama. During the business session the delegates went on record in favor of adding a woman suffrage amendment to the United States Constitution. They also declared in favor of admitting women students to the Univer­ sity of Georgia, of having women members on boards of education, and of having women physicians in the state insane asylum. Since they con­ sidered "taxation without representation" contrary to American princi­ ples, they recommended that women be exempted from paying taxes as long as they remained disfranchised.12 Mrs. McLendon asked to be relieved of her office, and Mrs. Gertrude C. Thomas was elected president of the Association. Mrs. Thomas had been active in suffrage affairs since her arrival in Atlanta in 1893 and had served as recording secretary of the Georgia Association.13 The Association's next convention was held in Atlanta in November 1901. On this occasion Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt was the featured speaker. The delegates adopted resolutions praising Mrs. Catt's "magnificent oratory" and reaffirming their belief in suffrage "as a mat­ ter of simple justice." Miss Katherine Koch of Atlanta was elected to the presidency of the Association.14 The following year, 1902, Atlanta women made an overt bid for a fragment of suffrage. The city's charter was being revised, and Mrs. McLendon, Miss Koch, and several others went before the revision com­ mittee and asked for the right to vote in municipal elections. Their appeal was said to have been a strong one, but the committee refused to grant their request. It also rejected a subcommittee recommendation 48 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY that women be permitted to serve on park, health, hospital, and school boards.15 In December 1902 a group of women met with Mayor Livingston Mims to discuss the possibility of voting in a coming bond election. The mayor listened sympathetically and promised to refer the matter to the city council. But when the bond issue referendum was held the following March, women were not permitted to vote. Some protested by placing at the polls large placards proclaiming: "Taxpaying women should be allowed to vote in this bond election."18 In 1904 Mrs. Rose Y. Colvin succeeded Miss Koch as president of the Georgia Woman Suffrage Association. Mrs. Colvin served for two years. Then Mrs. McLendon once again accepted the office and held it until the Association disbanded in 1921. In 1909 Atlanta was again revising her charter. To support their claim to the franchise, the suffragists gathered information showing that much property in the city was owned by women. There was some senti­ ment in favor of allowing all taxpayers to vote. However, the General Charter Revision Committee did not agree, and Atlanta women re­ mained disfranchised.17 The following February, the city held a referendum on a $3 million bond issue. The mayor and the president of the Chamber of Commerce asked the Federation of Women's Clubs to influence men in favor of the bonds. The suffragists' reply was a poster showing "women of all sorts, sizes, and conditions, armed with brooms, umbrellas, rolling pins, etc. driving men to the polls."18 In the spring of 1913 another votes-for-women organization, the Georgia Equal Suffrage League, was formed in Atlanta. Its president was Mrs. Frances Smith Whiteside, principal of the Ivy Street School and one of the few teachers who participated actively in the movement.19 Appealing chiefly to teachers and businesswomen, the League soon had several hundred members throughout Atlanta and its environs.20 Also in 1913, a Georgia Men's League for Woman Suffrage was formed with Leonard J. Grossman, an Atlanta attorney, as president. The Men's League played a minor role in the movement but served as a symbol of masculine support. It had few members outside of Atlanta.21 The following year, 1914, a group of Atlanta women organized the Equal Suffrage Party of Georgia. Most of them were long time suffragists who were dissatisfied with the performance of the Georgia Association. The party began with fewer than one hundred members but soon had branches in thirteen counties. Its president was Mrs. Emily C. McDou- gald.22 In the spring of 1917 a branch of the National Woman's Party was established in Georgia. The National Woman's Party was the militant faction of the movement and was led by Alice Paul who had crusaded with the Pankhursts in England. After touring the state, two of its repre- Journal — Winter 1979 49 sentatives held an organizational meeting in Atlanta.23 About sixty women attended, and a Georgia chapter of the party was formed with Mrs. Beatrice Castleton, an Atlanta attorney, as state chairman.24 Most Georgians strongly disapproved of the tactics of the National Woman's Party. Mrs. Emma T. Martin of the Georgia Association con­ sidered the militants notoriety-seekers, and Mrs. Whiteside of the Suf­ frage League called them the "mad women ofthe cause."25 The National Woman's Party conducted no militant agitation within the state. In fact, most of its militancy took place in Washington where women picketed the White House, burned effigies of President Wilson, often conflicted with the police, and were sometimes arrested and jailed. Though never militant, Atlanta women crusaded energetically for their cause. They made house-to-house canvasses; circulated petitions; conducted cooking schools, bazaars, rummage sales, neighborhood teas, and essay contests; and sponsored courses in citizenship and parliamen­ tary law. On one occasion they staged a May Day celebration on the steps of the Capitol. In 1915 they sponsored a parade as part of the city's Harvest Festival. The parade was led by Miss Eleanor Raoul on a prancing horse. She was followed by Mrs. McLendon and several "maids of mystery" wearing masks. They rode in a car once owned by Anna Howard Shaw, but which had been sold for taxes as a protest against the taxation of women without representation. Then came a brass band followed by two hundred marchers wearing "votes-for-women" sashes. Next came a group of college girls in cap and gown followed by a procession of two hundred decorated automobiles.26 The Atlanta suffragists distributed numerous leaflets and pam­ phlets. They sought publicity in newspapers, and the Constitution and the Journal regularly gave accounts of their activities. On March 3, 1914, the Georgian published a special woman suffrage edition. Throughout the state, editorial comments were often favorable, but no Georgia news­ paper actively championed the woman's cause. During 1914 the Georgia legislature for the first time conducted hearings on the suffrage issue. Resolutions to amend the state constitu­ tion to enfranchise women were introduced in both houses and referred to appropriate committees. Addressing the House committee on behalf of the resolution were Mrs. Mary Latimer McLendon, Mrs. Elliott Chea­ tham, Leonard J. Grossman, and James L. Anderson of Atlanta, and Mrs. Rebecca Latimer Felton of Cartersville.27 Speaking in opposition were Mrs. Dolly Blount Lamar of Macon and Miss Mildred Rutherford of Athens.28 Both sides made eloquent pleas, but the opposition prevailed and the committee reported unfavorably.29 When the Senate committee conducted its hearing, Mrs. Felton and Mrs. Cheatham spoke for enfran­ chisement while Mrs. Lamar spoke against it. By a vote of five to two, the committee recommended that the suffrage resolution not pass.30 During the 1915 session the House Committee on Constitutional 50 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

1913 photograph of Mary L. McLendon, "Mrs. Hardin" and "Mrs. Grossman," advocates of woman suffrage. (AHS Collections) Amendments again conducted a hearing on suffrage. Mrs. Frances Smith Whiteside, Mrs. Cheatham, and Mrs. Felton asked that men make women their equals in politics, while Miss Rutherford and Mrs. Lamar maintained that women should not "leave their homes and firesides and enter into a sphere" for which they were "neither fitted nor educated."31 A few days later Mrs. Felton and several other women spoke for suffrage before the Senate committee.32 No one spoke against it. The opposition was totally victorious, however, for both committees reported unani­ mously against the proposal to enfranchise women.33 The suffragists were equally unsuccessful in 1916. Resolutions to amend the Georgia Constitution to grant suffrage to women were intro­ duced in both houses. The House Committee on Constitutional Amend­ ments reported unfavorably, and the Senate committee did not bother to report.34 The next year, 1917, suffrage resolutions were again introduced in both houses. At the House committee hearing, Mrs. McLendon stated: "All we ask of you is to make us, the other half of humanity, the equal of yourselves. Before we go abroad to teach democracy to other nations, we should first give liberty to our women at home."35 Miss Caroline Patterson of the Georgia Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage main­ tained that the majority of Georgia women did not want to vote and, for Journal — Winter 1979 51 that reason, should not have the ballot forced upon them.36 Once again, the opposition prevailed, and the committee reported unfavorably.37 The suffragists fared better with the Senate committee. After listen­ ing to appeals by Mrs. McLendon and others, its members voted eight to four in favor of enfranchisement.38 This was the first time that a Georgia legislative committee had reported favorably on the suffrage issue. The suffragists were delighted, but the Senate adjourned without acting on the report and Georgia women remained disfranchised. These repeated rebuffs by the legislature seemed to illustrate the hopelessness ofthe suffrage cause. Yet, unexpectedly, an entering wedge was found on the local level. In 1917 the city council of Waycross decided to permit women to vote in municipal primary elections.39 No other city followed immediately, but Atlanta women took note and once again began thinking about municipal suffrage. Finally on May 3, 1919, the Democratic Executive Committee of Atlanta voted twenty-four to one to permit them to vote in city primary elections.40 Mrs. McLendon called the committee's action "the dawn of a better day not only for the women of Georgia but for the state itself."41 At long last, Atlanta women could vote. But, as City Attorney James L. Mayson pointed out, the commit­ tee's jurisdiction extended only to city primaries. Legislative approval would be necessary before they could vote in state or county primaries.42 A few weeks later in June 1919, the federal woman suffrage amend­ ment was submitted to the states for ratification. When the Georgia legislature met for its regular session, nine states had ratified the amend­ ment and none had rejected it. Georgia suffragists realized that the proposed amendment stood lit­ tle chance and hoped that the issue would not be raised. There were, however, some men in the legislature who wanted Georgia to have the distinction of being the first to go on record against it. Resolutions to ratify the Susan B. Anthony Amendment were intro­ duced in both houses. They were not introduced in good faith, however, but simply for the purpose of bringing the question before the legislature. In the course of the proceedings, both were amended to read "reject" instead of "ratify." After some debate and much parliamentary maneu­ vering, on July 24 both houses adopted resolutions stating that the An­ thony Amendment was "not ratified" but instead was "hereby re­ jected."43 The press then hailed Georgia as the first state to go "on record against suffrage."44 In essence, this was correct, but because of a techni­ cality, this claim was not entirely valid. Both houses had passed resolu­ tions of rejection. But the Senate never acted on the House resolution, and the House never acted on the Senate resolution. Hence neither had passed both houses. This oversight was discovered when the respective resolutions reached the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House for final engrossing. Thus, additional legislative action would be 52 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY necessary before Georgia's rejection would be official. When the legislature met the following summer, thirty-five states had ratified the suffrage amendment. The approval of only one more was needed. Some hoped that Georgia would modify the position taken the previous summer. However, the opposition was as strong as ever and no concession was made. On August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment became part ofthe United States Constitution, but under existing state election laws, the right of Georgia women to vote was still in doubt. When the state-wide Democratic primary was held September 8, women were not allowed to participate.45 Mrs. McLendon went to the proper precinct but was not permitted to cast a ballot.46 She protested, but to no avail. During the weeks that followed she continued to seek "some official way" to implement the Nineteenth Amendment in Georgia.47 On the eve of the general election in November, she admitted that "all her efforts had been in vain."48 Georgia women did not vote in the 1920 election. Finally in 1921, the legislature passed an act enabling women to vote and hold office.49 The suffrage issue was at last settled, and Georgia's opposition was a matter of history. As time would tell, however, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment had not yet been laid to rest. In the spring of 1970, the Georgia legislature adopted a resolution declaring that the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was "ratified and approved."50 The resolu­ tion also expressed pride in "the outstanding record compiled by the female citizens of this State in the effective and informed use ofthe right to vote."51

NOTES

1. Mississippi was the other state that did not allow women to vote in the November 1920 election. 2. For an account of early woman suffrage activities, see A. Elizabeth Taylor, "The Origin ofthe Woman Suffrage Movement in Georgia," Georgia Historical Quarterly, XXVIII (1944):63-80. 3. Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1894, p. 93, pp. 103-10. Cited hereafter as NAWSA Proceedings. Other cities under consideration were Washington, Cincinnati, and Detroit. 4. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage (Rochester and New York, 1881-1922), IV: 236. Journal — Winter 1979 53

5. Both Dr. Shaw and Mrs. Catt later served as presidents of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Mrs. Catt was president at the time when women gained suffrage nation-wide through the Nineteenth Amendment. 6. Colorado was the state where women had been enfranchised in 1893. 7. Atlanta Constitution, 1 February 1895. Stanton, Anthony, et al., Women Suffrage, IV: 242-245. 8. Ibid., p. 247. 9. Atlanta Constitution, 6 February 1895. 10. Stanton, Anthony, et al., Woman Suffrage, IV, 238. During the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta later in 1895, the suffragists sponsored a booth and distributed much litera­ ture. One of their speakers was Miss Floride Cunningham of South Carolina who was a member of the Woman's Board ofthe World's Columbian Exposition and a niece of Ann Pamela Cunningham, founder of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union. 11. Mrs. Maxwell was a sister of H. Augusta Howard, the founder of the Georgia Association. 12. Minutes of the Georgia Woman Suffrage Association, 1899, pp. 11-12. 13. Atlanta Journal, 28 November 1899. Mrs. Thomas was sixty-five years of age. The Journal incorrectly states her age as seventy-five. She was born near Augusta in 1834. 14. Woman's Journal (Boston and Chicago, 1870-1917), XXXIII (January 25, 1902): 31. NAWSA Proceedings, 1902, pp. 69-70. 15. Atlanta Journal, 24 November 1902. NAWSA Proceedings, 1903, p. 70. 16. Ibid., 1904, p. 74. 17. Ibid, 1909, p. 75. 18. Ibid., 1910, p. 109. 19. Mrs. Whiteside was a sister of United States Senator Hoke Smith. 20. Mrs. Mary Latimer McLendon, "Georgia," in History of Woman Suffrage, VI, 133-134. 21. Ibid., p. 126. 22. Emily C. McDougald, "The Equal Suffrage Party of Georgia," in History of Woman Suffrage, VI, 134-136. Mrs. McDougald was a native of Augusta who had moved to Atlanta from Columbus in 1897. She was president of the Equal Suffrage Party from 1914-1916 and again from 1919 until it merged with the League of Women Voters. Other presidents were Mrs. L. S. Arrington of Augusta and Mrs. Frank P. Mclntire of Savannah. 23. The organizers were Elsie Hill, the daughter of Congressman E. J. Hill of Connecticut, and Beulah Amidon, the daughter of a federal judge. 24. Suffragist (Washington, 1913-1921), V (April 28, 1917): 7. Mrs. Castleton served as state chair­ man for the duration of the movement. 25. Atlanta Journal, 5 July 1917. 26. A. Elizabeth Taylor, "Revival and Development ofthe Woman Suffrage Movement in Georgia," Georgia Historical Quarterly, XLII (1958):351-52. 27. Mrs. Felton was Mrs. McLendon's sister. 28. Mrs. Lamar was vice-president of the Georgia Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, a Macon-based organization with members throughout the state. Miss Rutherford was principal of Lucy Cobb Institute. Many Atlanta women were indifferent toward suffrage, although some were strongly opposed. However, it seems that no anti-suffrage organization was formed in the city. 29. Georgia House Journal, 1914, p. 287. Atlanta Constitution, 8 July 1914. The committee vote was four in favor of and five against the suffrage proposal. 30. Georgia Senate Journal, 1914, p. 236. Atlanta Constitution, 17 July 1914. Atlanta Journal, 19 July 1914. 31. Atlanta Constitution, 30 July 1915. 32. Ibid., 4 August 1915. 33. Georgia House Journal, 1915, p. 1073. Georgia Senate Journal, 1915, p. 520. 54 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

34. Georgia House Journal, 1916, p. 354. Woman's Journal, XLVK (August 26, 1916): 280. 35. Atlanta Journal, 20 July 1917. Other speakers were Miss Rose Ashby of the Georgia Woman Suffrage Association and Mrs. Beatrice Carleton of the Georgia branch of the National Woman's Party. 36. Ibid. Miss Mildred Rutherford also spoke in opposition. 37. Georgia House Journal, 1917, p. 587. 38. Georgia Senate Journal, 1917, p. 612. Atlanta Constitution, 27 July 1917. 39. The council took this action as a concession to women property-owners in the city. 40. Atlanta Journal, 3 May 1919. The negative vote was cast by C. P. Bentley, an Atlanta attorney. Some of the women who worked actively for this concession were Mrs. McLendon, Mrs. McDougald, Mrs. Whiteside, and Mrs. A. G. Helmer. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 8 May 1919. 43. Georgia Senate Journal, 1919, pp. 677-678. Georgia House Journal, 1919, pp. 882, 910. 44. Atlanta Constitution, 25 July 1919. An editorial in the Macon News on July 25 stated: "As the first state to reject this amendment, Georgia has given a tremendous impetus to the fight against it. . . . The whole country had its eyes upon Georgia, and the outcome of the vote in the House and Senate on Thursday is gratifying in the extreme." 45. Their exclusion was based on a ruling of the State Democratic Executive Committee. 46. Atlanta Constitution, 9 September 1920. 47. Mrs. McLendon even telegraphed the Secretary of State in Washington and asked if she were "qualified to vote under the Nineteenth Amendment." The Secretary declined to express an opin­ ion. 48. Atlanta Constitution, 1 November 1920. In all other states except Mississippi, election laws that conflicted with the Nineteenth Amendment were repealed or overruled. 49. Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1921, p. 107. On Novem­ ber 20, 1921, Mrs. Mary Latimer McLendon died at the age of eighty-one. She had been born in DeKalb County and had moved to Atlanta prior to the Civil War. For almost three decades she had been the mainstay of the woman suffrage movement in Georgia. She was also a leader in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. 50. Georgia Laws, 1970 Session, p. 952. The resolution instructed the governor to send certified copies to the appropriate federal officials. 51. Ibid., p. 951. Women Authors of Atlanta: A Selection of Representatioe Worhs with an Analytic Commentary

By Barbara B. Reitt*

The popular image of southern womanhood created by Margaret Mitchell in Gone With the Wind has been so powerful for readers and movie fans that it is now firmly imbedded in the region's mythology. The current exhibit at the Atlanta Historical Society, "Atlanta's Women: From Myth to Modern Times," acknowledges that fact by making Scar­ lett O'Hara the prototype ofthe southern belle. Although literary critics still argue about the quality of Mitchell's literary achievement, no ob­ server of the American scene can seriously question Mitchell's skill as a storyteller or overlook the power of her fictional women—not only Scar­ lett but Melanie and the others—in shaping Americans' thinking about southern women. Popular images, however, do not always match reality. Moreover, one image, even an accurate one, cannot capture a reality so complex as that of the South's women, white and black, for over a hundred years of social change. However, if we look at what many writers from Atlanta have done and said, we can move closer to an understanding of southern femininity in all its contradictions and rich variety. Thirty-six Atlanta women authors are highlighted in one section of the exhibit.1 Although none of these other authors has enjoyed the popularity that Mitchell continues to command, their writing careers and their books tell us a great deal about the lives of southern women and the careers ofthe city's writers. These women were quite prolific authors: ofthe thirty-seven, includ­ ing Mitchell, only seven were one-book authors—Mitchell, Mary John­ son Blackburn, Henrietta Dull, Georgia Duncan, Annie Howard, Sarah Huff, and Mel-inda Porter. Two of these, of course, wrote books that proved to be hardy perennials. Mitchell's novel has been printed and reprinted internationally an astonishing number of times, probably sell­ ing well over ten million copies by 1965, and Dull's Southern Cooking,

* Editorial consultant and student in a doctral program at Emory University. 56 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY which the author herself published initially, sold well enough that com­ mercial publishers issued subsequent printings and editions. In their day, both books were likely to be found in many southern homes that boasted few other books besides the Bible. In contrast, Mary Edwards Bryan holds the honor of being the most prolific writer in this small group. As an editor for numerous nineteenth-century periodicals, includ­ ing the Sunny South, which was published in Atlanta, she wrote virtually "on order" whatever was needed to fill out an issue, be it a poem, a short story, an essay, a review, or a filler. She apparently wrote more than a dozen novels, perhaps even more; because her novels were often pub­ lished serially in the magazines and many of her pieces were published anonymously or under a pseudonym, it would be extremely difficult to compile a comprehensive list of Bryan's works.2 Nevertheless, it is clear that she was unusually industrious; most of these thirty-six women wrote fewer books, the average lifetime production being about three or four. A high proportion of the exhibited books are local imprints; of the thirty-six, thirteen, or about one-third, were published in the city, and a fourteenth was published in Athens at the University of Georgia Press. Four ofthe one-book authors were locally produced. Dull used the Rural- ist Press, and Georgia Elizabeth Duncan and her illustrator, Rosine Raoul, had their book issued by the Mutual Publishing Company. Annie Hornady Howard's book, of value as a reference to local journalists, was published by the Southern Features Syndicate. Sarah Huff's memoirs, published first as newspaper columns, were produced directly under the sponsorship of the city school system, which may even have printed the booklet. A glance at the other local imprints among the thirty-six books provides an overview of the city's printing and publishing industry over the years. Charles P. Byrd published Bryan's poems; the Index Printing Company produced Rebecca Latimer Felton's memoirs;3 Foote and Dav- ies published Mary Ann Harris Gay's famous recollections of Civil War times; James P. Harrison issued Lollie Belle Wylie's Cherokee Rose an­ thology; and Franklin Printing is acknowledged as printer but not pub­ lisher of Ruth Elgin Suddeth's anthology of Atlanta poets. Though Marg­ aret Wootten Collier's multi-volume work lists no publisher, it may also have been produced locally. Commercial printing firms were not alone in producing local au­ thors' works; institutions also performed the publishing function, as when the Georgia State Department of Archives and History published the works of their own directors, Ruth Blair and Ella May Thornton. Oglethorpe University, possessing at one time its own university press, published the state poetry anthology, an imposing volume edited jointly by Thornwell Jacobs and Mary Brent Whiteside, to whom the school also awarded an honorary doctorate. It hardly needs to be pointed out that all these local imprints were works whose subject matter was local or regional. In these books is seen further evidence that American academic Journal — Winter 1979 57 publishers and small commercial printers have long served an im­ portant publishing function, the preservation and dissemination of locally and regionally valuable literature, lore, and history. Even a superficial analysis of »J •%. the thirty-six books reveals some­ thing else: no matter where the women authors had their works published, they most frequently wrote about home. When the South, or the state of Georgia, or the city of Atlanta is not the ac­ tual subject of a book, it is often the background or is used as the setting for the action. Twenty- three of the thirty-six books are clearly rooted in or about the South, its history and its people, and over half of these—thirteen —are works of outright local history. Mary Edwards Bryan, c. 1892 (AHS Collections) Analyzed a slightly different way, the books reveal another and per­ haps unexpected fact: these women wrote as much nonfiction as they did fiction or poetry. If we include the two poetry anthologies compiled by Whiteside and Suddeth in the nonfiction list—their work as editors and critical commentators in these books sets them apart from Bryan, John­ son, and Wylie, whose books are collections of their own poems—then the list yields eighteen belletristic and eighteen nonfictional works. These books reveal a sustained interest among the women in biogra­ phy and autobiography. Eight of the thirty-six books are biographical and in addition many of the belletristic works are highly autobiogra­ phical. A number of the early writers, like Avary and Wylie, compiled both their own and others' recollections, papers, and memoirs for publi­ cation. At the other end of the 1850-1950 time period is Louise Hays's biography of Revolutionary hero Elijah Clarke. If we glance at work published by one of the authors after 1950, we find that interest in biog­ raphy was to continue; Elizabeth Stevenson, here represented by her first work, in literary criticism, would subsequently build her reputation pri­ marily on her work as a biographer. Most of these books were intended for a popular or general audience, albeit at times a strictly local one. Only seven of the thirty-six volumes were intended for professional or specialized groups of readers. Brookes, Orr, Stevenson, and Thompson clearly wrote works for academic readers, and Collier, Blair, Hays, and Thornton wrote for historians and genealo- 58 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY gists interested in biographical details about locally or regionally promi­ nent individuals. An eighth writer, Johnson, represents a wholly different situation: a black woman writing about the black experience, she was writing for a black audience. Most of her other work was much less "race- conscience" than the poems in Bronze, but all her poetry was highly popular, though known only to black Americans.4 Only a handful of these thirty-six books were intended for readers with above-average critical acumen. Julia Collier Harris almost certainly translated the Rumanian Ispirescu's work for a small readership, perhaps the same sort of audience sought by novelists Frances Newman and Isa Glenn. These three, like Mitchell, achieved unprecedented levels of rec­ ognition among Atlanta's authors: Harris (with her husband, for their newspaper work) and Mitchell (for her novel) won Pulitzer prizes; New­ man won not only one of the annual 0'Henry awards for a short story but also the friendship and praise of both H. L. Mencken and James Branch Cabell;5 likewise, Isa Glenn received the O'Henry prize and praise from critic and poet Stanley Kunitz for her six well-wrought nov­ els.6 Because publishers' old records are notoriously hard to come by, it is extremely difficult to establish a given book's sales record and thus gauge its popularity.7 Famous books like Gone With the Wind establish well-known sales records, but books by locally known authors are another matter entirely. Other criteria for a book's success do exist, but they are only rough measures and must be used with caution. For example, used- book dealers have indicated that Madge Bigham's children's books pass through their hands regularly, which suggests, but does not prove, mod­ est but continuing success for her works. More concrete evidence of success is supplied when a book is known to have been reprinted or issued in new editions, but even readily docu­ mented evidence like this needs to be interpreted carefully. For example, Brookes's book was reprinted three times before it was remaindered in the late 1970s, but this does not mean as impressive sales for the book as might be supposed, for the publisher was a university press and aca­ demic publishers routinely issue small editions. On the other hand, the several reprintings of Dull's cookbook suggest much larger sales as it was reprinted and distributed nationally by Grosset and Dunlap. Gay's works provide a third sort of cautionary example. Her Life in Dixie appeared in at least three editions; apparently even more popular was another of her books, The Pastor's Study, which saw eleven editions by 1880. But the first was published by an Atlanta printer and the second by the Southern Methodist Publishing House, and both books were published at a time when southern publishers were exporting very little to the North. Again, we do not know the numbers of books sold, but chances are Gay's readers were not numerous by modern standards and were located almost entirely in the South. Journal — Winter 1979 59

Henrietta Dull (AHS Collections)

If being banned is a measure of success, then Newman emerges as the clear winner in this group. Her Hard-Boiled Virgin, set in Atlanta, was censured not only in many offended Atlanta households but, in 1929, was banned in Boston as well.8 On the other hand, if sheer long life is the mark of success, C. Mildred Thompson's encyclopedic work on Geor­ gia during Reconstruction should receive the laurels; originally published in 1915 (it was her doctoral dissertation), it survives today in the form of a reprint on the lists of two reprint publishers. The intellectual fashions among southern women as writers and readers are reflected in these thirty-six books. Those from the late nine­ teenth century, for example, show the post-Civil War frame of mind we might expect. Romantic memories of an idyllic or heroic past, as in Porter's derivative verses or Wylie's sentimental ones, vie with a more literal urge to defend and to preserve the details about a fast- disappearing way of life, as is reflected in Avary's more sociological "exposition of social conditions." Women persisted in their fascination with their own roles in the South's past; time and again, women's mem­ oirs appear, harking back to a nineteenth-century and presumably hap­ pier South. For example, Gay's memoirs were first printed in 1892 and by 1901 were into a fourth edition; Felton's popular memoirs were in a 60 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY second edition-in 1919; and Huff's were offered to the city's pupils nearly twenty years later. It was a genre that seemingly would always find an apprecia­ tive audience. Other literary fashions were more short-lived. The great popularity of local color and ethnic folklore (in a tone that was at times downright patron­ izing) in America at the turn of the century can be seen in the works of Mary Johnson Black­ burn, Martha Jane "Matt" Crim, and Georgia Elizabeth Duncan. As time passed, the dialect stories subsided and local-color fiction gave way to a harsher fic­ tional realism. With the 1920s came the resurgence now known as the southern renascence, a re- Margaret Mitchell holding cat (AHS Collections)' birth of vigor that would belie the taunts of H. L. Meneken, who called the region the "Sahara of the Bozart" as if the illiterate-looking pun on beaux arts would capture in a phrase the essence of Southern backwardness. The renewed vigor in the arts would support the work of Atlanta writers like Glenn, Newman, Harris, Whiteside, and Seydell. Their works were franker, more cynical, and more daring than any by southern women up to this time. Another native Atlantan, Georgia Douglas Johnson, is often associated with a different literary resurgence of the twen­ ties and thirties, the Harlem Renaissance.9 Johnson's rather conventional poems show few of the radical themes and forms associated with the work of con­ temporary black writers, but they were popular, appearing in numerous periodicals and in an­ thologies of black literature.10 Among black women poets of the Minnie Hite Moody, c. 1940 (AHS Collections) Journal — Winter 1979 Q\ period, only Johnson published her works in book form." Johnson lived in Washington, D.C., where she worked for the labor department and figured prominently in black literary circles. She was never a part ofthe Atlanta community of writers, which, of course, was all white, though she had been born, raised, and educated in the city, graduating from Atlanta University in 1893. There followed, beginning in the 1930s, a fruitful period for the writers of popular novels for light reading—romances and mysteries—of which the variety and number can only be suggested. Margaret Mitchell so dominates this era that the other successful women novelists from Atlanta are sometimes overlooked. For example, Alice Campbell, Evelyn Hanna, Edna Lee, Minnie Hite Moody, Medora Field Perkerson, Mar­ guerite Steedman, and Thelma Thompson (Slayden) were all well- known as productive novelists at this time. Some of these books, like Mitchell's and Perkerson's, were made into movies—an option that emerged in the 1930s among Atlanta's writers and that had revolution­ ized the American writer's economic life. By 1950 women were beginning to move in significant numbers into many new occupational and professional fields, a fact reflected in the increasing variety of types of books that can be found in the Atlanta Historical Society's collection of works by local writers. Most noticeable is the sharp rise in the number of technical and professional books by women, including texts for higher education and treatises for use by university specialists. Stevenson's and Brookes's books, published in 1949 and 1950, represent a new trend just beginning to emerge. Likewise, as the twentieth century progressed, women's religious writing gradually became more professionalized. Religious sentiment has long been expressed by women most directly in poetry and sometimes in their personal memoirs. Common, too, were instructional materials writ­ ten by women for use in the South's Sunday schools. Catherine Mar­ shall's Mr. Jones, Meet the Master (1949) represents a further develop­ ment for female writers in the religious field; in editing her late hus­ band's sermons for issuance by a national publisher, Marshall was mak­ ing her first strong bid for a national reputation. Her subsequent success and the gradual emergence of her own voice replacing that of her hus­ band's can be seen as typical of an intermediary stage in the evolution of women as professional theologians. Successfully combining personal experience with her own religious philosophy, this Agnes Scott graduate has become a widely read and influential religious writer.12 Finally, the careers of these writers as well as their narratives add detail and color to a portrait of female economic life in Atlanta through the years. Although writers in America sometimes can earn high incomes by selling subsidiary rights, they seldom manage to make a living exclu­ sively from writing and publishing their books; this group of women authors is no exception. Only the very prolific Bryan and the enormously 62 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY popular Mitchell could have earned significant amounts from their writ­ ing. Most of the women either were supported by their families, some of them quite affluent, or they earned their living at occupations peripheral to their careers as book authors. These occupations are in themselves revealing. All but one of these jobs are associated with words or books. Five of the women were archi­ vists or librarians: Blair, Hanna, Hays, Newman, and Thornton. One, Lee, worked in public relations and advertising. Ten were teachers at some point in their lives: Bigham (who founded what may have been Georgia's first private kindergarten),13 Brookes, Dull, Duncan, Felton, Johnson, Orr, Stevenson, Suddeth, and C. Mildred Thompson. A slightly larger group were journalists (reporters, feature writers, columnists, and broadcasters): Avary, Bryan, Crim, Dull, Felton, Harris, Lee, Mitchell, Perkerson, Seydell, Steedman, and Wylie. This group included at least four who also were employed as editors of publications: Bryan, Harris, Seydell, and Wylie. It is not surprising to discover that the two black women found employment either in black education (Johnson as a public school teacher in her early years, Brookes as a college professor) or in the federal government (Johnson as a widow received an appointment from Calvin Coolidge in the labor department, a reward for her husband's service to the national Republican party14). When we compare the variety of kinds of books written by these women with the lack of variety in the jobs they held, we can conclude that the economic and social limitiations on their choices were more forceful than the intellectual ones were. Or to put it another way, the women seem to have found more freedom in the privacy of their "studios"16 than anywhere else, more latitude of mind than of behavior. At certain periods, the authors living in the city were closely tied to each other not only by virtue of their common interests as writers but sometimes as people employed in the same places and at the same tasks. These authors reviewed each others' books in the city's newspapers and used each other as subjects of their feature articles; in addition, they helped each other in their research.15 The mutual support they provided is a subject worthy of full study. Many of these women never married, and among the married women a variety of family situations prevailed. The clearest pattern that emerges is that the writing careers of all the authors were profoundly affected by their marital status. Crim, for example, wrote professionally until she married, and then she stopped writing altogether. Some were pushed into writing careers by the financial emergency precipitated by a husband's death: newly widowed, Dull and Wylie needed money for themselves and their children and so chose writing, in part because of its respectability. Widowhood, if not financial need, propelled Marshall into authorship. Bryan, who eloped during her adolescence and who apparently lived with her husband only intermittently, seems to have begun her writing career partly for the money and partly because it may Journal — Winter 1979 63 have given her some emotional and economic independence from her husband and from her father, with whom she and her infant son lived during the early unstable years of her marriage. Glenn, who married a career army officer, lived the wandering life of the military wife and wrote only for her own pleasure until she was widowed when she at long last began to write profes­ sionally.17 Several of the mar­ ried women did not attempt public careers of any sort until Medora Field Perkerson at Women's Press their children were grown. Fel­ Club party before GWTW premiere with Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, and ton, whose writing can best be Elizabeth W. Hunt (AHS Collections) described as one facet of her work as a political activist and reformer, devoted roughly the first fifty years of her long life wholly to child-rearing and housekeeping, adding to these duties only to help her husband's career from time to time. Her own work filled the last half of her life. Edna Lee, of a later genera­ tion, also waited until her sons were grown before entering any field professionally; even then, she wrote her books while riding At­ lanta's trolleys to work each morning. Johnson likewise did not publish a book until her sons were nearly grown. Some of the authors mar­ ried into journalistic or literary families. Julia Harris worked with husband Julian on their Columbus newspaper; her father-in-law was the renowned Joel Chandler Harris. Medora Field married Angus Perkerson, editor of the Atlanta Journal Magazine, and wrote all her books after marrying. Some of the women were links in appar­ ently strong literary and intellec­ tual traditions handed down in their families. Dorothy Orr's work in the history of educa- Dorothy Orr (AHS Collections) 64 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

C. Mildred Thompson (on right) feted after receiving honorary degree from Oglethorpe Uni­ versity (AHS Collections) tion in Georgia perpetuated the Orr family's commitment to the state's schools, a commitment lasting over a hundred years. Novelist Lee's son Harry also wrote novels, one as co-author with his mother. Glenn also raised a writer; her son Bayard Schindel began his literary career as an adolescent with the publication of his novel Golden Pilgrimages. In short, any line dividing these women authors' private lives from their professional lives is extremely thin and arbitrary; the form of one dictates the form of the other in case after case. Even the single women are not exempt, for they too could be hindered in their pursuit of a book- writing career by the distractions of full-time salaried positions. For example, Frances Newman, a professional librarian, found it necessary each time she wrote a book to take a leave of absence from her staff jobs, retreating behind the protective ministrations of the black woman long employed as a maid by the Newman family.18 For many years Elizabeth Stevenson has pursued her book-writing career during evenings, week­ ends, and vacations, in the time she has away from her daytime jobs. Personal details about these authors, especially the women now long dead, are often very obscure. Nevertheless, it is probable that only a handful among the thirty-seven had the means to support ideal condi­ tions for a writer: ample privacy and the time to write. Most enviable, perhaps, were the authors whose jobs required them to write their books, such as scholars CM. Thompson and Brooks or archivists Blair, Hays, and Thornton. In 1860 Mary Edwards Bryan, one of the earliest and certainly one Journal — Winter 1979 65 of the most professional writers in this sample, published a revealing essay about the woman author. "How should a woman write?" she asked. Cognizant of the possibility that her hopes might be "but a Utopian dream," she nonetheless declared that women should write "as men, as all should write to whom the power of expression has been given— honestly and without fear." Sneering at women who write works that dally with "surface bubbles," Bryan earnestly hoped that women were beginning to learn that "genius has no sex, and that... it matters not whether the pen is wielded" by a man or a woman.19 It must be admitted that some of the thirty-six authors did better than others in meeting Bryan's very high standards, but those who excelled may well have done so not only because they were blessed with innate qualities of genius and honesty. Their achievement might also be attributable to their having had the good fortune to work under social, economic, and personal circumstances that did not frustrate their "powers of expres­ sion."

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ATLANTA WOMEN AUTHORS Avary, Myrta Lockett (1859-1947). Dixie After the War: An Exposition of Social Conditions Existing in the South .... New York: Doubleday, Page, 1906. A journalist's partisan, first-hand portrayal of social upheaval in the postwar South. Bigham, Madge Alford (b. 1874). Stories of Mother Goose Village. Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1903. Sequels to traditional Mother Goose tales, by the woman who as a child always wanted the stories to go on and on. Blackburn, Mary Johnson (n.d.). Folk Lore from Mammy Days. Boston: Walter H. Baker, 1924. Dialect stories and poems told by a female Uncle Remus character. Blair, Ruth (1889-1974). Georgia Women of 1926. Atlanta: Georgia Department of Archives and History, 1926. The state historian's biographical dictionary listing the accomplish­ ments of women in many fields, the first and only issue in a pro­ jected series. Brookes, Stella Brewer (b. 1903). Joel Chandler Harris, Folklorist. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1950. A scholarly treatment of Harris's use of antebellum black folklore in his Uncle Remus books. 66 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY Bryan, Mary Edwards (18387-1913). Poems and Stories in Verse. Atlanta: Charles P. Byrd, 1895. A rare anthology of the prolific editor's verse. Campbell, Alice (Ormond) (b. 1887). Desire to Kill. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934. Romantic murder mystery set in Europe and peopled with sophisti­ cates. Collier, Mrs. Bryan Wells (Margaret Wootten) (b. 1869). Biographies of Representative Women of the South, 1861-1920. 5 vols, n.p., n.d. (1920). Illustrated biographical dictionary celebrating the "mothers of the Confederacy." Crim, Martha Jane "Matt" (1863-1945). In Beaver Cove and Elsewhere. New York: Charles L. Webster, 1892. Tale about southern mountain folk in the local color tradition so popular in the nineties. Dull, Henrietta Stanley (1863-1964). Southern Cooking. Atlanta: printed by the Ruralist Press for the author, 1928. Recipes giving the "southern way" to cook, many of which first appeared in the author's Atlanta Journal column. Duncan, Georgia Elizabeth (n.d.) Samanthy Billins of Hangin'-Dog. Atlanta: Mutual Publishing Co., 1905. Illustrated by Rosine Raoul. Samanthy's adventures, including the time she "ketches the ram- blin' complaint." Felton, Rebecca Latimer (1835-1930). Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth. 2nd ed. Atlanta: Index Printing Co., 1919. "Literary accumulations" and reminiscences of a very long and ac­ tive public life. Gay, Mary Ann Harris (b. 1827). Life in Dixie During the War: 1861- 1862-1863-1864-1865. 4th ed. Atlanta: Foote and Davies, 1901. A Decatur lady's memories of war-time life in the Atlanta area. Glenn, Isa (b. 1885). A Short History of Julia. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930. Novel of manners set in middle Georgia during World War I era, revealing undercurrents in relations between women and men, blacks and whites. Hanna, Evelyn (b. 1900). Blackberry Winter. New York: Dutton, 1938. Historical novel tracing the rise and fall of a cotton-planting family in middle Georgia. Harris, Julia Collier (1875-1967) (with Rea Ipcar). The Foundling Prince and Other Tales, Translated and Adapted from the Rouma­ nian of Petre Ispirescu. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917. English adaptations of the nineteenth-century Rumanian's artistic Journal — Winter 1979 67 versions of his national folk tales. Hays, Louise Carolina Frederick (b. 1881). Hero of Hornet's Nest: A Biography of Elijah Clarke, 1733-1799. New York: Stratford House, 1946. The state historian's carefully documented account of the Revolu­ tionary hero's life and the history of upper Georgia, 1773-1799. Howard, Annie Hornady (n.d.), (ed.). Georgia Homes and Landmarks. Atlanta: Southern Features Syndicate, 1929. Celebration of persons and places that symbolize to the author the finest in the Georgia tradition. Huff, Sarah (1856-1943). My 80 Years in Atlanta. Atlanta: n.p., n.d. (ca. 1937). Personal memories of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods in Atlanta. Johnson, Georgia Douglas (1886-1966). Bronze: A Book of Verse, with an introduction by W. E. B. DuBois. Boston: B. J. Brimmer, 1922. Verse about being black and about black motherhood, a book the author described as "child of a bitter earth-wound." Lee, Edna (b. 1890). Web of Days. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1947. Historical gothic romance about a northern girl who is governess and then wife of a cruel sea island planter. Marshall, Catherine (b. 1914), (ed.). Mr. Jones, Meet the Master. Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1949. A collection of her minister-husband's prayers and sermons, pub­ lished during the year following his death. Moody, Minnie Hite (b. 1900). Once Again in Chicago. New York: Alfred H. King, 1933. Novel that focuses on two Chicago world's fairs, forty years apart. Newman, Frances (1883-1928). The Hard-Boiled Virgin. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926. A stylistic tour de force revealing the mind and mores of an early twentieth-century young girl from Atlanta. Orr, Dorothy (1886-1975). A History of Education in Georgia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950. The first comprehensive history of the state's schools by the grand­ daughter of the founder of the public school system, Gustavus J. Orr. Perkerson, Medora Field (1898-1960). Who Killed Aunt Maggie? New York: Macmillan, 1939. Murder mystery in the classical mode, later a successful movie, set in "Wisteria Hall" of Roswell. 68 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY Porter, Mel-inda Jennie (n.d.). Valkyria, or Chaplets of Mars. New York: W. B. Smith, ca. 1881. Whitmanesque "tribute to valor" by an author known to us only through her book. Seydell, Mildred (b. 1889). Secret Fathers, n.p.: Macauley Company, 1930. Problem novel about an independent young widow determined to be a mother despite her having no husband. Steedman, Margeurite (1884-1963). But You'll Be Back. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942. Romance of small-town Georgia told by "Miss Cora" Gaunt, wise enough to know the town's true value. Stevenson, Elizabeth (b. 1919). The Crooked Corridor: A Study of Henry James. New York: Macmillan, 1949. Study of the great writer and winner of the Georgia Writers' Asso­ ciation's Literary Achievement Award for 1950. Suddeth, Ruth Elgin (b. 1893), (ed.). An Atlanta Argosy: An Anthology of Atlanta Poetry, n.p.: privately printed at Franklin Printing, 1938. Includes essays about Atlanta's literary community in the twenties. Thompson, C. Mildred (1882-1975). Reconstruction in Georgia: Eco­ nomic, Social, Political, 1865-1872. New York: Columbia University Press, 1915. The first full-length scholarly examination of the many facets of Reconstruction in Georgia, by a professional historian and dean of Vassar College. Thompson, Thelma (Slayden) (b. 1908). Give Us This Night. New York: Arcadia House, 1939. Romantic novel of social upheaval in New Deal days in a mill town in middle Georgia. Thornton, Ella May (1885-1971). Georgia Women 1840-1940: A Record of Achievement. Atlanta: [Georgia State Department of Archives and History], 1941. A widely used pamphlet written by the state historian in response to queries from national reference book editors. Whiteside, Mary Brent (b. 1882), (with Thornwell Jacobs, eds.). The Oglethorpe Book of Georgia Verse. Atlanta: Oglethorpe University Press, 1930. Possibly the most comprehensive anthology of Georgians' poetry ever published. Wylie, Lollie Belle (1858-1923). Legend of the Cherokee Rose and Other Poems. Atlanta: Jas. P. Harrison, 1887. The title poem is the most famous in this collection of sentimental and religious poems by the popular Atlanta journalist. Journal — Winter 1979 69 NOTES

1. These thirty-six authors, each represented by one book, were selected from a group of over seventy writers who were born in Atlanta or were otherwise closely associated with the city. A preliminary list of local authors was compiled after the completion of a search through the Atlanta Historical Society's Atlanta Writer's Club Collection (1925-1967), the Society's collection of works by Georgia writers, and its clipping files, in addition to cross-checking the listings in such bibliogra­ phies and biographical dictionaries of southern or Georgia authors as: Lucian Lamar Knight (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of Authors, vol. 15; Library of Southern Literature, ed. Edwin Anderson Alderman, et al. (Atlanta: Martin & Hoyt, 1907); Bertha Sheppard Hart, Introduction to Georgia Writers (Macon, Ga: J. W. Burke, 1929); Atlanta Junior Members Round Table of the American Library Association, Georgia Author Bibliography: 1900-1940 (Atlanta: Inez B. Brown, 1942); Aure- lia Austin (ed.), Revised History of the Atlanta Writers Club, Atlanta, Georgia, 1914-1967 (Dallas, Ga.: Dallas New Era, 1967); William T. Wynn (ed.), Southern Literature: Selections and Biographies (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1932); and two publications featured in the exhibit, those by Ruth Blair and Ella May Thornton. Also helpful were 0. B. Emerson and Marion C. Michael (eds.), Southern Literary Culture: A Bibliography of Masters' and Doctors' Theses, rev. ed. (Univer­ sity, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1979), and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969). The search for local authors continued beyond the walls ofthe Historical Society, and thanks are due especially to Frank 0. Walsh, III of the Yesteryear Book Store and Fred C. Bose of the Hound Dog Press Book Store for their assistance. Lee Alexander, archivist at Atlanta University, generously made the use of the Negro Collection easy for the researcher, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall's advice made the search for black women authors far more efficient. Finally, Diane E. Windham's help plus her "Guide to Manuscript Sources in the Special Collections Department for Atlanta, Georgia" (Atlanta: Emory University, 1978, mimeographed) were also essential. Dr. Darlene Roth's cricitism of an early draft was, as always, incisive and wise. The selection of the books was governed by a number of criteria: first, of course, the book's availability for display; second, its condition; third, its representativeness of an author's work or, in some cases, ofthe work of a significant group of women writers; and, finally (and most difficult), its ability to contribute to an accurate overall picture of the female writer's life and work in Atlanta. Many more authors and books could easily have been exhibited, space allowing, for Atlanta's women have been prolific writers over the years. Books not considered for inclusion in the exhibit were, first, those written and published after 1950; second, those published by the so-called vanity presses; and third, genealogies and family histories. 2. James S. Patty has recently summarized the essential facts about Bryan's career for Notable American Women 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 264-65; a less scholarly but lively contemporary portrait other can be found in Mary Tardy's Living Female Writers ofthe South (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1872), pp. 316-24. Tardy also includes numerous excerpts from Bryan's works. 3. Felton is the subject of a full-length biography: John E. Talmadge, Rebecca Latimer Felton: Nine Stormy Decades (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1960), which contains a comprehensive bibli­ ography of her works. 4. Johnson discusses her reasons for usually avoiding the subject of race in her poems in a letter to Erna Bontemps, 19 July 1941, Negro Collection, Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia. 5. John E. Talmadge has written Newman's brief biography for Notable American Women, pp. 622- 23. 6. Glenn seems to have been forgotten, more than she deserves. Stanley J. Kunitz, Living Authors: A Book of Biographies (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1935), pp. 152-53, groups her with other native southerners who were creating the region's literary renascence, authors like Newman, Cabell, Tate, Faulkner, and others. Atlanta newspapers frequently featured Atlanta-born Glenn and her son Bayard Schindel, also a novelist. But after the early 1930s little more is heard of the writer, and today copies other books are very hard to locate. All but one, the last, were Borzoi books, published by the innovative New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf. 70 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

7. For a description of the problems of researchers in publishing history, see Howard Mumford Jones's foreword to William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), pp. vii-x. 8. Alec Craig, Suppressed Books: A History of the Conception of Literary Obscenity (Cleveland: World, 1963), p. 132. 9. Gloria T. Hull assesses Johnson's literary career in her essay "Black Women Poets from Wheatly to Walker," in Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1979), pp. 69-86. 10. Periodicals like the Urban League's Opportunity published her poems, and two typical antholo­ gies are Singers in the Dawn, published by Atlanta's Commission on Interracial Cooperation (n.d.), and James Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1931). 11. Hull, p. 81. 12. For details about Marshall's career, see Contemporary Authors (Detroit: Gale Research, 1968), vol. 29-39, p. 251. See also Who's Who in America (1974-75) and Paul Bayer, "Minister's Wife, Widow, Reluctant Feminist: Catherine Marshall in the 1950's," American Quarterly 30 (Winter 1978): 703-21. 13. Letter to author from Sandra L. Bayer, Historic Preservation Section, Department pf Natural Resources, 29 April 1975. The school was at 503 Peeples St., S.W. Bigham's career is outlined in Who's Who in America. 14. Undated clipping in Georgia Douglas Johnson biography file, Negro Collection, Atlanta Univer­ sity. 15. For example, Mitchell was indebted to Avary for historical details she used for her novel. The Atlanta Historical Society holds a copy of Gone with the Wind that its author presented to the older journalist, thanking her for her assistance. 16. See, for example, the photograph of the poet Whiteside seated in her "studio" in Howard's Georgia Homes, p. 168. 17. Childhood playmate Frances Newman remembered that as a youngster Glenn was "always shut up in her room scribbling"—Atlanta Journal Magazine, 7 September 1924, p. 5. 18. Medora Field Perkerson, "Frances Newman Writes Brilliant Book," ibid., 7 December 1924, p. 9. 19. The essay originally appeared in Southern Field and Fireside (Augusta, Ga.), 21 January I860; it is reprinted in Tardy, Living Female Writers of the South, pp. 335-39. The High Heritage

By Carlyn Gaye CrannelP

Although individuals and groups in Atlanta began discussing the city's need for an art museum as early as the 1870s, this need was not remedied until almost fifty years later. In 1926 with the presentation to the Atlanta Art Association of her Peachtree residence given in memory of her deceased husband, Mrs. Joseph Madison High provided a place which could be used for a fine arts museum and school of art. This gift and Mrs. High's other contributions to the city have been largely forgot­ ten or obscured over the years. On this occasion of special recognition of the women of Atlanta, it is appropriate to give an accounting of Mrs. High's varied roles within the community to make her more familiar to contemporary society, the beneficiaries of her generosity. Harriet ("Hattie") Harwell Wilson (later Mrs. J.M. High) was a native Georgian, born at Sandtown Plantation on the Chattahoochee River in Campbell County, November 30, 1862.' "Sandtown Place," about twelve miles from Atlanta, was a large, columned house in the Greek Revival style which her father, James Harwell Wilson, had pur­ chased sometime after its completion in 1832.2 After the deaths of Mr. Wilson's first two wives,3 he married young Mary Frances Green on De­ cember 3, 1861. Although Mary Green was a native of Georgia, she had lived and studied in New England before her marriage.4 When Hattie was still an infant (probably in 1863) the family was taken by wagon to one of Mr. Wilson's other plantations in Jonesboro, Georgia, to avoid the Union Army's threatened takeover of the area. Hattie's father died on July 19, 1865, and since the Sandtown home had been used by Sherman's troops as a hospital and the caretaker who had been left in charge did not welcome the return of the Wilsons, young Mary Wilson and little Hattie went to Atlanta, a city of 20,000 people, where they experienced a very different kind of life in a small house "below street level."5 For a few years Mrs. Wilson supported herself and her daughter by sewing and by taking in roomers. A photograph of Hattie at about the age of four or five shows her in a dress of gray brocade made from her mother's wedding dress.

* Emory University Ph.D. candidate in the Institute of Liberal Arts. 72 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY Mary Wilson was remarried on December 16, 1869, to Captain Aaron "Gip" Grier. Grier had been living in Atlanta since losing a leg during active service with Col. George Adair's "Southern Confederacy" and had remained in the city during Sherman's siege and occupation. Hattie's new stepfather was a cousin of Alexander H. Stephens,6 who would visit Atlanta occasionally on business. She disliked her stepfather at first—"especially the sound of his peg-leg"7—and was not fond of Mr. Stephens either. When Stephens was campaigning for governor of Geor­ gia in 1882, he frequently stayed at the Grier home; Hattie would tell her grandchildren in later years that when he came to visit, the furniture in his bedroom had to be rearranged, for Stephens believed that "the bodily humors were improved when the bed was placed heading exactly north by his compass."8 Since Captain Grier was a well-to-do man, Hattie and her mother were able again to live comfortably and securely in a spacious house and to enjoy the benefits of a privileged social class. Although Atlanta's pub­ lic schools were opened in 1872, Hattie attended private schools, includ­ ing "Mrs. Ballard's School" (later called the Atlanta Female Institute), founded by Mrs. Josephine Ballard. This school had an excellent reputa­ tion for educating young ladies in traditional academic subjects as well as in music and art.9 Hattie was a diligent scholar who was encouraged, if not tutored, by her mother, who had excelled in languages, history, art, and music at the Bloomfield Female Institute in New Jersey.10 Because of her mother's interest in academic and aesthetic pursuits, Hattie grew up in an environment which emphasized the importance of learning and nurtured a love of the fine arts. In later life Hattie High was called by her contemporaries "a great lover of books," and on various occasions she "planted living memorials to her favorite authors in Authors' Grove, Piedmont Park."11 Other than reading, Hattie Wilson's special interests were always music and art. "She had a clear soprano voice and sang in the choir at church, probably Central Presbyterian Church in downtown Atlanta."'2 At her graduation from Mrs. Ballard's institute on June 9, 1881, a pro­ gram consisting of "choice readings and music" was held at DeGive's Opera House for ". . .an audience representative of the culture of the city. . . ."'3 Included in the evening's offerings was a song, "When The Tide Comes In" (Millard) by "Miss Hattie Wilson [who] sang with a grace and sweetness highly enjoyable."14 Hattie must have demonstrated unusual vocal ability, for at one point she was offered a scholarship in voice by a noted teacher, but since a singing career was thought to be "improper" for a correct young southern lady, it was not accepted. Music continued to be important to Hattie, however, and in later years in addition to participating in the church choir she hosted numerous parties and receptions which included musical programs. As a member of Colo­ nial Dames, she served on the music committee for an elaborate enter- Journal — Winter 1979 73 tainment to raise funds for soldiers of the Spanish-American War.15 (It is interesting that one of Hattie's fellow committee members. Mrs. Isaac Boyd, would also become an important contributor to the development of art in Atlanta.) It is not known whether Hattie had any formal instruction in draw­ ing or painting beyond what she received at Mrs. Ballard's, but she loved to study and sketch trees, flowers, and birds and pursued this as a hobby throughout her life. An oil painting by Hattie, dating from the late 1920s, was found rolled up between attic rafters in her home after her death in 1932.16 It was carefully copied from a post card or print of "The Little Girl with the Pinks" by an English artist she admired. During Hattie's high school years at Mrs. Ballard's, numerous pro­ fessional artists and artistic groups were appealing for increased civic support for the establishment of a fine arts gallery in Atlanta. The YMCA sponsored the city's first public exhibition of art in 1882, featur­ ing objects on loan from collectors and patrons of the arts in Atlanta. An enthusiastic public response inspired future loan exhibitions, the most important of which was sponsored a few months later by the Young Men's Library Association in their new hall. This exhibit consisted of American and European paintings and graphic art borrowed from indi­ viduals and institutions in Atlanta and other cities. These exhibitions were grand social events as well as opportunities for southerners to see works of art of some distinction displayed in an atmosphere unrelated to county and state fairs. Spectators were expected to respond soberly to this so-called "high art" which was extolled by the press as being morally uplifting and culturally upgrading. Though family records reveal little about her specific activities as a young lady, Hattie Wilson was characterized in one newspaper account as "a popular belle of the post-war era."17 On the evening of September 6, 1882, the not quite twenty-year-old married Joseph Madison High in the Grier home on Forsyth Street. A large number of guests attended, including the Honorable A.H. Stephens, who was staying at the Grier home while making final preparations for the gubernatorial race, which he won.18 After a wedding trip to New York, Niagara Falls, Chicago, and other cities, the couple moved into the Grier household where they lived for the next five years. Joseph M. High, born near Madison, Georgia, May 27, 1855, had learned merchandising and storekeeping from his father during his teen­ age years and by the time of his marriage to Hattie was considered a successful and ambitious young businessman. Having moved to Atlanta in 1880, he operated a dry goods store with E.D. Herring until 1884 when he became the sole owner of the firm which for more than fifty years was known as the J.M. High Company. The first meeting of Joseph High and Hattie Wilson took place one day as she was shopping in the High & Herring store; their marriage lasted twenty-four years until his death in 1906. 74 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Hattie Wilson on her wedding day, September 6, 1882, and Joseph Madison High, c. 1890. (Courtesy of Joe High Williams)

The Highs had four children; their first, Ernest Grier, was born in 1883. In 1886 the society column of The Evening Capitol reported that "Mrs. J.M. High and her bright little one, after a pleasant visit to rela­ tives in Madison, has [sic] returned to the city." It is not known whether the "bright little one" was her son or her daughter, Harriet Mary ("Hattie May"), born in 1885. Scarcely two months later the same news­ paper carried a notice of Ernest's death, the result of an intestinal occlu­ sion. In addition to Hattie May, two more daughters were born to the Highs—Elizabeth Emerson (named for Joseph's mother) in 1887 and Dorothy Madison in 1893 on their eleventh wedding anniversary. Most of the family's activities were church or home centered; however, J.M. High was frequently preoccupied with business affairs. He was an astute businessman who always seemed to understand the needs of his patrons and usually undersold his competitors—the Keely Company, Morris Rich, and Chamberlin-Johnson-DuBose. During the 1880s and '90s as the children and the business grew, Mr. and Mrs. High traveled twice a year to New York on buying trips for the store. Sometimes the girls went along, but at other times stayed with "Mama High" or with a governess. When Hattie May and Elizabeth were in their late teens, they often traveled with their father to New York where they enjoyed being taken to horse shows and treated to shopping sprees. When the family moved into their own house at 418 Peachtree in Journal — Winter 1979 75 the late 1880s, the social pages of the Atlanta newspapers frequently reported parties and receptions given there and praised Hattie High's role as hostess. The last decade of the century was a very active one for the High family, especially after Dorthy was born. While Joseph High tended to business, Hattie's social involvements escalated: she assisted in fund- raising activities for the 1895 Cotton States Exposition; planned dances and parties for her daughters; gave fund-raising teas for the new North Avenue Presbyterian Church; joined various patriotic societies; and trav­ eled. The 1890s brought unhappy events as well. A year or so after the Highs moved into their elegant home, Aaron Grier died suddenly of a paralytic stroke. Hattie's mother came to share their home until her own death six years later.19 Hattie's devotion to her mother is evident in the Family Genealogy which she compiled and illustrated in 1924 and dedi­ cated "to the memory of my dear mother, the most perfect woman I have every known." In addition to these two deaths, there was family illness as well. Joseph High was in poor health. Throughout the '90s, the Highs' annual summer voyages to Europe included extended stays in Germany where Joseph "took the cures." Though suffering from Bright's disease, he con­ tinued to work as long as he could until his death on November 2, 1906, at the age of fifty-one. After his death High was applauded as a man who had succeeded through patience, industry and character; coupled with hard work and good fortune, his astuteness and insight into merchandis­ ing had made him a wealthy man.20 His generosity was a well-known fact in Atlanta, as he contributed liberally to charities, churches, and to individuals who were in need. In spite of her widowhood (or, perhaps because of it), Hattie High proved herself to be a very determined woman who proceeded to accom­ plish a variety of goals. For the next twenty-five years she traveled exten­ sively, assumed business responsibilities, and became increasingly in­ volved in philanthropy and in various patriotic groups. Following the marriage of Hattie May to Toulman T. Williams in 1907, Mrs. High took her other two daughters "on an extensive world tour which she and Mr. High had hoped to take together and for which they had enjoyed studying."21 In Naples on December 30, 1909, she began her travel diary with this entry: "Elizabeth, Dorothy and I sailed from New York on December 11th on the North German Lloyd Berlin (120 Tons). She is a new boat, having made her first trip in May this year." The three women traveling independently of any group, enjoyed 4 xh months of touring, visiting Egypt, Palestine, India, China and Japan. Aside from sixteen-year-old Dorothy's pneumonia which required a ten-day conva­ lescence in Bombay, the trip was without serious incident. Hattie's diary is amazingly detailed, indicating the extent to which she studied about the many areas of Biblical and historical interest they toured. On April 76 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY 13, 1910, upon arrival in Japan, she observed: "The black pine trees make it look just like a Japanese print. . . . Most fortunately for us the cherry trees are at their best and the countless hundreds of them look like great masses of pink cloud." Her accounts of Egypt disclose a sense of adventure, even wit, and an early page of the journal features her drawing of the Great Pyramid of Cheops along with her impressions of it. Sometime during 1910 or 1911, Mrs. High (along with her American automobile and her chauffeur, Jim Whitehead) spent one winter in Paris with daughter Dorothy, who was attending Madame Yateman's School there. Upon their return to Atlanta, plans were made with architect Walter T. Downing for a large Tudor home and servants' quarters to be built for Mrs. High, her two youngest daughters, and their small staff which included Alice Flanders, an "unbelievably good cook who was devoted to the High family for as long as anyone remembers."22 Located on a prominent knoll at Fifteenth and Peachtree Streets, the mansion was ready for occupation by 1912. It was perfect for parties and recep­ tions held for the girls as well as for Hattie's many friends and social groups. Both Elizabeth and Dorothy were married here amid elegant trappings in 1914 and 1919, respectively.23 During World War I, Mrs. High offered her home for Red Cross work, and after the great Atlanta fire of 1917, Dorothy and Hattie opened their doors to refugees who were camping out at Piedmont Park. The residence was also occupied by evangelist Billy Sunday and his family when they were in Atlanta for a series of revivals in November and December 1917 while Mrs. High and Dorothy were touring the western United States. Hattie's middle daugh­ ter, Elizabeth, had died during childbirth in April 1916, the funeral service having been held in the Peachtree home.24 During the years following her husband's death, Mrs. High assumed control of the J.M. High Company and was largely responsible for its steady growth for the next fifteen or more years. However, in the mid- twenties, Mrs. High decided to sell the company while retaining owner­ ship of the department store buildings for rental income. She stipulated at the time of this transaction that the name of the company should remain the same or the rent ofthe buildings would be subject to arbitra­ tion. In this way she guaranteed the perpetuation of her husband's name, a matter of primary importance to her. It may have been at this time that she began contemplating the establishment of a cultural institution in his name as well. As had been the case with her husband, "many of Mrs. High's phi­ lanthropies were attended by a modesty and avoidance of the public eye which effectively kept knowledge of them from all but her most intimate friends."25 It is known, however, that she gave liberally to charities such as a "Home for Incurables" and a local orphanage;26 at Thanksgiving and Christmas, sometimes accompanied by her granddaughter, she delivered Journal — Winter 1979 11

#20 Joseph M. High residence (AHS Collections) baskets of food to these two institutions as well. She also established the Hattie Wilson High Memorial Fund for books and research at Carnegie Library in Atlanta (now the H.W.H. Memorial Genealogy section at the Atlanta Public Library). She contributed to the Berry Schools and to Oglethorpe University, where she served on the University Woman's Board as art committee chairman. She is credited with having had a group of pictures framed for the university which had been given by the French government. Other gifts included oil paintings, the most noteworthy of which are two large portraits of General and Lady Oglethorpe purchased by Hattie in Eng­ land and presented to the university in 192427 and which now hang in the library. (Although Mr. and Mrs. High enjoyed art museums and bought various art objects and antiques on their European trips, it cannot be said that either of them was a serious collector of art; in this regard they were content to be spectators.) In addition to money and works of art, Mrs. High provided the university with six chimes in 1929 for short, daily concerts. Oglethorpe University demonstrated its appreciation to Hattie High in its 1929 commencement exercises by awarding her the honorary degree of doctor of letters, of which she was very proud. Aside from her apparent generosity and its attendant sense of re­ sponsibility, Mrs. High's personal interests were expressed through memberships in hereditary and patriotic societies: the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the National Society of Colonial Dames of America, 78 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY and Daughters of the American Revolution; she also organized both the Georgia Society of the Daughters of the American Colonists and the Georgia Society of Daughters of Founders and Patriots of America and was appointed their honorary president for life. She was a member ofthe Order of First Families of Virginia and the Clan Campbell Association of America, both lineage societies. Hattie High was absorbed in the genealogy of her own family and was successful in tracing her ancestry to European royalty.28 As a result, she was qualified to become a member of the International Society of Daughters of the Barons of Runnemede and the Order ofthe Crown in America. Whether Hattie High's motives in joining these groups were social advancement, family pride, or per­ sonal feelings of exclusivity, no one can say. She once remarked that the reason she participated in so many organizations was that it was "a good way for grandmothers to keep busy and out of harm's way."29 Of these groups, the DAR claimed much of Mrs. High's time; as a memorial to the founders of the Atlanta DAR, she presented a fountain designed by her favorite architect, Walter T. Downing, to the city of Atlanta in 1915, the year she served as regent ofthe Atlanta chapter. The fountain, with its modern-day sculptured addition, was built at the in­ tersection of Peachtree and Fifteenth Streets, just across the street from Mrs. High's Tudor estate. Throughout her lifetime Mrs. High contributed to the church of which she was a founding member, North Avenue Presbyterian.30 She gave of her time as well as her money, teaching the "cradle roll class" and participating in the Woman's Society which she served as president from 1899 (the year of its establishment) to 1901. Permanent High mem­ orials may be seen inside the church today: family memorial windows dedicated to Mary Frances Grier (and her mother, Mary Stiles Green), Joseph High, and Hattie High are located in the chancel. Hattie pro­ vided the windows to her mother, grandmother, and husband; her chil­ dren and grandchildren presented the third window in her memory after her death. Mrs. High's magnanimity in Atlanta and in Georgia can also be seen in several public monuments, including the fountain. Two others were statues of Dr. Crawford W. Long and Alexander H. Stephens commis­ sioned for the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Her childhood dislike for Stephens having changed to admiration, Hattie donated the funds for his monument, a marble statue which now stands in the Capitol's Hall of Fame or "Statuary Hall" "as one of Georgia's two exhibits, the other being Dr. Crawford Long, discoverer of Anasthesia (sic)."31 Sculptor Gut- zon Borglum displayed a model of the sculpture for the approval of the Atlanta Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and used marble from quarries in Tate, Georgia, for the full-sized figure. February 11, 1927, (Stephens's birthday) was the occasion for its formal instal­ lation which featured speeches by distinguished men and women of Georgia.32 Journal — Winter 1979 79 However, Mrs. High's single most significant gift was the deeding of her Tudor-style home to the Atlanta Art Association in 1926 in mem­ ory of her husband. This gesture more than any other endeared her to the city of Atlanta, and especially to those individuals and groups who had been striving for over two decades to secure funds for a sorely needed center for art activities. With the official founding ofthe Art Association in 1905, Mrs. Isaac Boyd and eight dedicated women had pledged to work for such a center and hoped that public interest in an art museum would be stimulated by regular art exhibitions and lectures. Although interest in local exhibits was first indicated in the late 1870s, by 1926 there was still no art museum in Atlanta. Despite successful loan exhibitions in 1924 and 1925 and the enthusiasm of Association members and its presi­ dent, J.J. Haverty, funds were still insufficient for a permanent museum. Twenty years had passed since a charter had been granted to the Art Association, and their primary goal remained unfulfilled. Then, to every­ one's surprise, Mrs. High announced in early May of 1926 that she wished to present her former home at Fifteenth and Peachtree to the Association "to be used as a permanent museum of art for the city of Atlanta."33 Prior to this time, Hattie High had not indicated special interest in the Art Association, but now she revealed that it was something of which I had been thinking a long time . . . but some­ how the actual arrangements were never made until now. I saw the need of an art museum in Atlanta, and I recognized the great desire of the city's art lovers for such an institution. In making the gift, I felt I was merely doing my part for Atlanta. It is a greater favor to me, to be permitted to make this gift, than it could be to the city of Atlanta to receive it.34 There had been plenty of opportunities for men or women to come to the aid of the arts in Atlanta prior to 1926, yet an art museum had always been conceived as a joint venture between the Art Association and city government and its realization was largely dependent on contributions, pledges, and funds netted from exhibitions, art sales, and entertain­ ments. The plan had always been to construct a museum "from scratch." Perhaps if an appeal had been made for an existing building, the history of Atlanta's art museum would have evolved very differently. No one stepped forward before Mrs. High, whose gift was "unconditional except that the museum [was] to be used always for art purposes, or else revert back to Mrs. High or her estate."35 The reaction to Mrs. High's generosity was overwhelming, and plans were made immediately to make necessary alterations so that a formal opening, with the third annual Grand Central Galleries exhibit, could be planned for the fall. The house had been occupied by Mrs. High and her two youngest daughters from 1912 to 1921, at which time she sold it to the Lynch family, from whom she was able to reclaim it later for a reported $100,000.36 Fortunately, architect Downing had considered in his total plan "the placement of a reflection pool near the entrance, as 80 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

well as an English garden in the rear,"37 so that the grounds were perfect for sculpture. The house with its spacious halls and num­ erous rooms also contained a landing on the broad staircase which had been planned as a platform for orchestras playing for High family parties.38 The upstairs area was easily con­ verted into studios and offices for the art school, while the main level became museum exhibition space. In praising Mrs. High, the Atlanta Constitution stressed that through this gift Hattie Wilson High, c. 1900 (Courtesy of Joe High Williams) the hopes and dreams of more than 25 years come true, and this city will no longer be listed among those few remaining metropolises that have neglected the cultural side of life to such extent that no shrine exists within their bounds where man's achievements in the realm of physical beauty may stand for all who will to see and admire.38 Nathaniel Burt, in surveying the art museum phenomenon of the post- Civil War era, observes that "it was imperative that a proper city should have a proper art museum as a sign of cultural maturity."40 Based on this statement, Atlanta in 1926 had finally come of age. Atlantans who for many decades had enjoyed their public library, opera house, and theatres could now add the High Museum to its list of cultural attainments. Following the announcement of her gift, Mrs. High sailed to Europe, "a trip of Hattie May's planning."41 Her initial journal entry of June 6th tells of having grandson Joe High Williams with her; she added that all our friends have been most kind in doing everything in the ways of parties and calls and gifts. The greatest possible appreciation from the whole city and state for the gift of our old home, 1032 Peachtree, for the "High Museum of Art" in memory of my husband; also for doing what I could for the Stephens statue in the Hall of Fame in Washington. Mrs. High found herself a cultural heroine, and she enjoyed this new notoriety. She received numerous letters and telegrams about her be­ quest, including letters from Mayor Walter Sims and from many clubs and civic groups. After her return from Europe, she was honored guest at meetings and banquets, and the UDC of Atlanta gave a reception in her honor on the birthday of Alexander Stephens to celebrate her gener­ osity. Journal — Winter 1979 81 By the time she had returned from Europe, the Peachtree home was ready to receive the Grand Central Galleries exhibition. A formal ban­ quet was held on Saturday evening, October 16, 1926, at the Biltmore Hotel where she was honored before a large assemblage which included the prominent American artists whose works were being shown. When Mrs. High was introduced, 350 leading Atlantans rose to their feet on spontaneous impulse and stir­ ringly applauded the beloved woman. Her response, in its heartfelt sim­ plicity, was typical of the woman. "I am happy to have had a part in the realization of our ambition," she said, "and I hope it will make us all happier."42 Throughout the next six years, Hattie High continued to contribute both time and money to the Art Association and High Museum. She served on the executive committee and board and was a vice-president and library committee member. Her frequent monetary gifts made possi­ ble the acquisition of works for the museum collections; she also added additional property to the original deed to ensure future expansion. Now the focus of her life had broadened to include art as well as patriotic and religious interests. On March 21, 1932, Mrs. High succumbed to a heart attack at her home after being in ill health for several months; she was sixty-nine. The Tudor-style High Museum on Peachtree soon became an At­ lanta landmark, and as the needs of the museum and art school ex­ panded, other homes in the area were acquired and adapted for museum use. The High home remained the primary building until 1955 when a new "fireproof" structure was built to accommodate the increasing collections and to provide necessary storage and office facilities. In 1963 the home which had stood for fifty years and which for almost forty of those years had represented the fulfilled goal of the Art Association was demolished. The 1955 building became the nucleus of the present Atlanta Memorial Arts Center, which incorporates the art museum and art school (now the Atlanta College of Art). Thus, the property is still utilized "for art purposes" as stipulated in Mrs. High's bequest. Inside the museum today, in an administrative office, hangs a large oil portrait of Mrs. High which was commissioned of Sidney Dickinson by the Art Association in 1926. Although it is not liked by her family and is not considered an especially good painting from a technical point of view, it was prominently displayed in the original High Musuem as a reminder to visitors who may have wondered, as visitors do today, why the museum is called "High."43 Certainly other women could be cited who contributed to the vitality of Atlanta during Mrs. High's lifetime—Mrs. Joseph Thompson, Mrs. Nellie Peters Black, Mrs. Samuel Inman, Mrs. Isaac Boyd—yet Hattie High remains unique. She loved the name High—possibly because it was 82 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY so often linked with art and culture, but probably because it came to represent a sense of security and pride during her marriage to Joseph High. Whether or not the facts of this woman's life are known or forgotten by Atlantans today, this name and its cultural connotations live on.

NOTES

1. Information from the Family Genealogy, compiled by Hattie Wilson High in 1924. Campbell County was created in 1828 and was absorbed by Fulton County in January 1932. Walter G. Cooper, Official History of Fulton County (1934), p. 699. 2. Sketching and Etching Georgia (Atlanta, Ga.: The Conger Printing Co., 1971), no page number. The plantation house "was built by Andrew Campbell from County Antrium, Ireland in 1832, with slave labor and of yellow pine timbers that were even more solid than anything obtainable today. The chimneys were made of hand made brick, fired on the plantation." It was destroyed by fire during an electrical storm in November 1953 while undergoing restoration. 3. According to Dorothy (Peteet) Mitchell, Hattie Wilson's granddaughter, Mr. Wilson's first two wives were of the Stubbs and Pitts families, respectively. 4. Information from Family Genealogy. Mary Frances Green was born May 27, 1840, in Clarke County and lived with her parents until age sixteen "when she was sent to New Jersey and New York for three years to study." 5. Dorothy (Peteet) Mitchell, "Notes on the Life of Hattie Harwell Wilson" (1978), an unpublished account of Hattie's life by her only granddaughter. Hereafter cited as Mitchell, "Notes." Atlanta was in a state of devastation at this time, so it is possible that Hattie and her mother remained in Jonesboro until the following year when Atlanta's exiled populace was encouraged to return to the city to begin rebuilding. At this time it is not known where James Wilson died or is buried, whether in Jonesboro or at Sandtown. 6. Alexander Stephens's mother was a sister of Aaron Grier's father; when Stephens's parents died in 1826 (Stephens was about 16), he lived with the Grier family in Wilkes County. Information from Atlanta Constitution, 2 December 1889, and from an undated narrative in the possession of Dennie R. Peteet, Jr., a grandson of Hattie Wilson. 7. Mitchell, "Notes." 8. Ibid. 9. Since Hattie's mother had been educated in a private female institute, she probably wanted the same environment for her daughter. The Atlanta Constitution of 22 December 1877 describes "Mrs. Ballard's Select School for girls" as a "commodious and comfortable" school which is patronized by "our best citizens"—"fifty girls from six to sixteen years of age. . . ." Madame Corput was in charge of teaching French, drawing, and painting. 10. Mary Frances Green attended Bloomfield Female Institute, Bloomfield, New Jersey, 1856-59; it is believed that she spoke French and German. Mitchell, "Notes." 11. Women of Georgia. (Atlanta, Ga.: Byrd Publishing Co., 1927), p.13. No one seems to be able to verify the location or existence of such a grove today. 12. Mitchell, "Notes." 13. Atlanta Constitution, 11 June 1881. 14. Ibid. 15. Atlanta Constitution, 2 June 1898. Journal — Winter 1979 33

16. Dorothy (Peteet) Mitchell has the painting now. 17. Atlanta Constitution, 22 March 1932. 18. One of the newlyweds' most unusual gifts was a book entitled Pictorial History of the U.S., with an inscription by John A. Stephens (nephew of Alexander Stephens), dated December 1883: The author of this work, the late Governor Alexander H. Stephens, promised a copy of it to Mrs. Hattie H. High as a bridal present, but died just after its publication, and before he had an opportunity of executing his purpose. Now, I, as his representative, present this book to her, and thus most cheerfully perform an act, which would have afforded him so much pleasure to have been able to do for himself. (The book is now in the possession of Dennie R. Peteet, Jr.) 19. Mary Grier died on March 6, 1896. Aaron Grier's death was reported in the Atlanta Consti­ tution, 1 December 1889. 20. The Atlanta Journal, 3 November 1906, reported that Joseph High's estate was valued at $400,000, of which $55,000 was life insurance. 21. Mitchell, "Notes." 22. Conversation with Dorothy High Peteet and Dorothy (Peteet) Mitchell in Atlanta, 6 July 1978. Alice Flanders, while in the employ ofthe High family, always had her own quarters—a small house on the grounds near the garden. 23. Elizabeth married James Goodrum on October 14, 1914; Dorothy married Dennie R. Peteet on February 20, 1919. 24. It is a curious and unhappy fact that beginning with the death of son Ernest in 1886, Mrs. High suffered the loss of other loved ones at exact ten-year intervals: her mother in 1896, husband Joseph in 1906, and daughter Elizabeth in 1916. Whether or not she was aware of this strange series of coincidences is unknown, but the pattern fortunately did not persist into the twenties. Rather, 1926 would be crucial for a more favorable event—the presentation of this truly lived-in Peachtree residence to the Atlanta Art Association. 25. Atlanta Journal, 22 March 1926. 26. Probably the Atlanta Orphans Home, according to Dorothy Mitchell. The Atlanta Constitution, 26 October 1903, carried a picture of a new "Hospital for Incurables" to be erected by the "Atlanta Circle of the King's Daughters and Sons." Hattie could have been a member of this group since her family tree was traced to European royalty. 27. The Stormy Petrel, student newspaper of Oglethorpe Unversity, Atlanta, Ga., 6 February 1924, p.ll. 28. According to Dorothy (Peteet) Mitchell, Mrs. High would consult with Stella Pickett Hardy in Washington, D.C., when in that city for the annual DAR congresses. 29. Dorothy (Peteet) Mitchell telephone conversation, 3 December 1978. Mrs. High's name first appeared on the DAR roster of members in 1897. 30. Although J.M. High had been a Baptist, Hattie was a Presbyterian and both were founding members of the North Avenue Presbyterian Church which was effected December 4, 1898. Their daughter Dorothy was given the honor of breaking the first ground for this church as the Highs had been the first to donate to the building fund. The new church was first occupied on Thanksgiving Day in 1900, and "ivy brought from Scotland by Mrs. High was planted." (Walter G. Cooper, Official History of Fulton County, 1934, p. 560). 31. James B. Nevin, ed., Prominent Women of Georgia. (Atlanta, Ga.: The National Biographical Publishers, n.d.), p. 41. An interesting sidelight of which Mrs. Hugh was surely aware was that Alex Stephens and Crawford Long were college roommates their last two years at the University of Georgia (then known as Franklin College) in the dormitory known as "Old College," the first brick building on the campus. 32. Atlanta Constitution, 19 October 1926. Dorothy (Peteet) Mitchell recalls that in 1927 during extremely cold weather, "grandmother, mother, my brother Dennie, and I went with a group from Atlanta to Washington, D.C. where Dennie and I unveiled a large statue of Alexander Stephens, as an outstanding Georgian, in the statuary hall at the U.S. Capitol." (Mitchell, "Notes.") 33. Atlanta Constitution, 9 May 1926. Mrs. High had to repurchase the house after selling it when 84 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY she moved to a smaller house nearby on Fifteenth Street; the Lynch family had lived in the Peachtree home only a short time when Mrs. High bought it back from them for the purpose of giving it to the Art Association. She made "an outright deed of gift, naming all of the citizens of Atlanta as the recipients, and designating the Atlanta Art Association as the administrator of the gift." (Cooper, History of Fulton County, p. 522) 34. Atlanta Constitution, 9 May 1926. 35. Ibid. 36. Information from Dennie R. Peteet, Jr., February 1978. Atlanta city directories indicate that Mrs. High lived at 1032 Peachtree until 1921; then her address became the Georgian Terrace Hotel until she moved into her Fifteenth Street home sometime in 1922. 37. Atlanta Constitution, 2 December 1963. There was also a miniature house in the back of the main house which contained several rooms; it was used by Dorothy (Peteet) Mitchell, Mrs. High's granddaughter, as a playhouse for her dolls. 38. Atlanta Constitution, 2 December 1963. Article by Doris Lockerman. 39. Ibid. 40. Nathaniel Burt, Palaces for the People. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1977), p. 173. 41. Mrs. High's Scrapbook/Travel Diary, summer 1926, June 6th entry. 42. Atlanta Journal, 22 March 1932. 43. Considering the ambiguity of the name "High," it is unfortunate for Mrs. High's sake that the museum is not officially known as the "J.M. High Museum of Art," especially since the J.M. High Company no longer exists and since there are no direct male descendants who bear the surname High. There are many who thus have no idea why the museum is named High, though some speculate that it has to do with "high culture" or "high art." Women Architects in Atlanta, 1895-1979

By Susan Hunter Smith*

On a national scope the first in-depth survey and evaluation of women's role in the architectural profession was Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective, edited by Su- sana Torre and published in 1977. Most architectural research has taken place in New York, Chicago, and California where the major women architects, Louise Bethune, Marion Mahoney Griffin, and Julia Morgan practiced their profession. This orientation occurs in Women in Ameri­ can Architecture with two exceptions from the South: Harriet M. Irwin, the first woman to patent a house plan, and Chloethiel Woodward Smith ofthe Mid-Atlantic region.1 The purpose of this study is to research the neglected women of southern architecture, focusing on those who have worked in Atlanta. The chronology extends from the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Piedmont Park to 1979, the year of the first organization of women architects in Atlanta. During these approximately eighty-five years there has been an increase in the number of women architects in Atlanta and in Georgia, with a dramatic upward curve since the mid- 1970s. However, the number of women within the field of architecture has always been, and continues to be, extremely small in comparison to the number of males. For example, registration figures from 1920-1978 in Georgia indicate women architects have never been more than 3 per­ cent of the total registration in any year, and the average registration percentage of women for any year is 1 percent. Precisely because of these ratios certain questions arise about the women and about the profession: What are the social characteristics of women who become architects? What motivates them? What avenues of education and/or training do they pursue in preparing themselves in architecture? How have their architectural accomplishments contributed to American architectural history on a local level in the South? In beginning this survey it was decided that a woman architect with an active practice in Atlanta was qualified for study regardless of where she was born or educated. For our purposes the group of women studied

* Doctoral student, Institute of Liberal Arts, Emory University. 86 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY here are exclusively architects, not landscape architects, interior design­ ers, artists, or builders. They publicly advertised as members of the architectural profession which became official in the United States with the founding of the American Institute of Architects (A.I.A.) in the mid- nineteenth century. Within this minority group of architects practicing in Atlanta cer­ tain statistics become relevant to the questions raised by this inquiry. Three sources have been consulted: (1) the architectural registration board of the State of Georgia, (2) the Atlanta Chapter of the A.I.A., and (3) the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Registration of architects was first required by law in Georgia in 1920. In that year 118 architects were registered, two of them women. Leila Ross Wilburn was the twenty-ninth registrant; Katherine Catheal Budd was the sixty-ninth registrant (a 1916 member of A.I.A. in New York). Only one other woman was registered in the 1920s, Mrs. Susie W. Thomas in 1927.2 The average of newly registered architects (male and female) each year from 1920 until 1929 was eighteen. In the 1930s two women were registered, both practicing outside Atlanta, in Macon and Columbus. Five women were registered in the 1950s, two women in the 1960s, seventeen in the 1970s. The total of registered women architects in Georgia from 1920-1978 is thirty-four. More than 50 percent of this total are women registered in the 1970s, indicating a clear and dramatic upsurge in the registration of women in the architectural profession in Georgia over this decade. Registration is not mandatory for work within an architectural firm; however, regis­ tration is a necessary credential for private practice in the state and for advancement within a firm. The figures indicate women architects are seeking this higher level of professionalism and opportunity in their careers. According to the records of the Atlanta Chapter of the Georgia Asso­ ciation of the American Institute of Architects, twenty-two women have been members of the chapter since its inception in the offices of Morgan and Dillon on March 13, 1906, in Atlanta.3 Henrietta C. Dozier was one of the six charter members of the Atlanta chapter along with Atlanta's major male architects, Alexander C. Bruce, Walter T. Downing, Thomas H. Morgan, Gottfried L. Norrman, and Harry Leslie Walker.4 There are two main categories of membership in the A.I.A., corpo­ rate membership and associate membership. Ofthe twenty-two women architects in the Atlanta A.I.A. from 1906-1978, fifteen were corporate members, six were associate members, and one A.I.A. member's status was unknown. The six associate members and the one unknown status member were not registered architects. Among the thirty-four registered women architects in the state, fifteen (almost half) did not belong to the Atlanta chapter of the A.I.A. Breaking the statistics down into decades, a contemporary pattern emerges. In 1906 there was one woman member Journal — Winter 1979 87 of the Atlanta A.I.A., Henrietta C. Dozier, who left Atlanta in 1916. Between 1916 and 1941 there were no women in the chapter. In the 1940s there were four new women members, in the 1950s two new women mem­ bers, in the 1960s four new women members, and in the 1970s there were eleven new women members. In 1968 Ellamae Ellis League was named a Fellow in the A.I.A., a first for a woman architect in Georgia. The upward pattern of overall membership and full corporate status in the major professional society in architecture has increased sharply for women. Combining both Atlanta A.I.A. and Georgia state registration rolls, a total of forty-one women architects were working in Georgia from 1905 to 1978. The birthplace of the women was primarily the South, the great­ est number having been born in Georgia. The third source for group data has been the enrollment of women in the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta which became coeducational after World War II. Before 1959 all women at Georgia Tech were listed by number but not by course of study. Using the fall quarter rolls, which are always the largest, it is apparent that from 1959-1969 there were never more than twelve women enrolled in the School of Architecture in the fall quarter and the percent­ age of women to men students never exceeded 3.8. However, from 1970 to winter 1979, there was a steady increase of female enrollment. For the winter of 1979, 143 women and 510 men were registered in the School of Architecture, a total of 653 students. Of this student body 21.8 percent were women and fifteen (or over 10 percent of the women) were at the master's level in architecture.5 This suggests a greater proportion of women in architectural offices in Atlanta in future years if the trend continues. Therefore, the recent upswing in women's ambition in the field of architecture is substantiated in architectural education as well as in state registration and voluntary professional association. The development of architecture as a profession for women spans four major periods in Atlanta's history: 1895-1920, 1920-1940, 1940-1960, and 1960 to the present. The turn of the century marked the first documented entry of a woman into the architectural profession in Atlanta; this pioneer was Henrietta Dozier, born ca. 1875 to Cornelia and Henry C. Dozier. She graduated from Girls' High School in Atlanta in 1891, living with her mother who was widowed when Henrietta was three or four.6 At her high school graduation and thereafter on the alumnae rolls through 1912 she listed herself by her father's nickname, "Harry Dozier."7 She took on the male name and later the male role of family breadwinner. After studying in New York, she was asked to prepare drawings for the Woman's Build­ ing of the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta.8 Her work was included in the exhibit of architectural designs organized by Mrs. John Keeley's committee along with contributions from women 88 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY architects in the New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago Schools of De­ sign. Dozier's inclusion as Atlanta's entry in the exhibit put her in the company of the "new woman" as represented by the building's woman architect, Miss Elise Mercur of Pittsburgh who had successfully com­ peted for the commission of designing the Woman's Building. This was part of the tradition established two years before with the Woman's Building at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Miss Mercur received a $100 prize for first place in addition to "the usual compensation."9 Bradford Gilbert of New York (not a native Atlantan), the chief architect of the Exposition, had initially suggested a woman architect for the woman's building, and he guided and judged the competition.10 It is not known whether Henrietta Dozier was in Atlanta for the Cotton States Exposition, but if she was at the cornerstone ceremony on Monday, April 22, 1895, she would have witnessed an exclusively male Masonic ritual with a roster of distinguished men as speakers. The cere­ mony is indicative of the mixture of attitudes in Atlanta toward women at the end of the nineteenth century when she was a young woman of twenty. Charles A. Collier opened the ceremony with chivalrous praise inter­ twined with a glimpse of a new industrious woman: The particular occasion which calls us together this evening is not. . .a mere incident in this enterprise [the exposition]. It is a distinguished and emphatic recognition and approval of a new and vigorous factor in modern thought and modern civilization which seeks to broaden and expand the sphere of woman's usefulness and to strike from her the shackles with which centuries of ignorance and bigotry have bound her." Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, admitted he was not notified until that very morning of his place on the speakers' list, but he was sure that . . .hand in hand with the men, the women of Atlanta, cheering and comforting them and helping them build this magnificent city. . .saying to all mankind that this great and beautiful city belongs not only to the men, representing not only the work and the activity and the enterprise, but that it also sheds the lustre and throws out the smiles of Atlanta womanhood, and shows that with the assistance and the cooperation of Atlanta's women the men of Atlanta are equal to any enterprise.12 The tone of the times acknowledged women's work as separate, useful, and a desirable auxiliary to the main work of men. The tools of masonry were then delivered into Mrs. Edward Peters's hands by the Grand Mar­ shall who requested that they be delivered to Miss Mercur, the absent Grand Architect. Finally, Mrs. Joseph Thompson, president of the Women's Board of Managers, thanked the Masons, the Fifth Infantry Band, and the press. She concluded with a ladylike, even childlike, de­ ference to Mr. Collier, who "has been ever lenient with our faults and Journal — Winter 1979 89 ever generous and considerate of our wishes."13 The recognition of women in the profession of architecture was given its due, but both the women and men of Atlanta at the laying of the cornerstone of the Woman's Building were careful to emphasize what the building stood for. It was a salute to the cheerful spirit of woman, "the everlasting sunlight of the smiles of the women of Atlanta."14 In the beginning the choice of a Ma­ sonic organization (which excludes women from its membership) by the Women's Board of Managers reflected a desire to have an appropriate seal of approval from their husbands' organizations just as they wished to be known as their husbands' wives. Henrietta Cuttino Dozier graduated from the Pratt Institute and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1899, one of three women in the class.15 Eleven years later in 1906, she was admitted to membership in the founding chapter of the A.I.A. in Atlanta along with Atlanta's major architects. She served as secretary to the chapter in 1910 and 1911 when Harry Leslie Walter was president and in 1912 when Haralson Bleckley was president. Her position amidst the male archi­ tects is listed but not commented on by Thomas Morgan, the first presi­ dent, in his history of the A.I.A. in Atlanta (1937). During the next ten years that Dozier was in Atlanta, 1906-1916, she was involved as a board member with the formation of the Architectural Arts League of Atlanta (1910), the decision to secure a registration law for architects in Georgia (1915), and a scholarship fund for the School of Architecture at Georgia Tech (a $200 loan to upper classmen, 1915-1916).16 There is only one structure which presently can be identified as the work of Dozier in Atlanta and this structure has been destroyed by fire. In 1903 Dozier built a small chapel on Peachtree Street at North Avenue for All Saints' Episcopal Church.17 From 1903-1910 she shared office space in the Peters Building with George W. Laine. Mr. Laine had origi­ nally opened an individual office in 1902 and the following year moved from the Lowndes Building into the Peters Building, sharing space (and possibly practice) with Miss Dozier. In 1913 Miss Dozier purchased a two-inch, bold-faced advertisement in the City Directory stating her A.I. A. status. She continued this ad for the next two years, changing her office twice within the Hurt Building. In 1916 Dozier left Atlanta as associate architect for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Jacksonville branch.18 She was forty-one when she moved to Jacksonville near Fernan- dina Beach, her birthplace.19 Her documented work in Jacksonville in­ cludes three Avondale houses, most notably the Welshan-Palmer house, a handsome Italiante house on the St. John's River which features a bold Palladian fagade. She drew plans for a new city hall, another Italian Renaissance structure. However, the city council ultimately decided not to build.20 Dozier maintained her A.I.A. membership in Florida until 1928. According to the national office of the A.I.A. in Washington, she was the third woman to be admitted into A.I.A., the first being Louise 90 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY Blanchard Bethune in New York (1888) and the second, Lois L. Howe in the Boston area (1901).21 Dozier was the first southern woman in the A.I.A. (1905) and was closely associated with the most prominent of Atlanta's ar­ chitects before World War I. However, the extent of her influ­ ence upon these architects and the architecture of this period of budding professional organization and urban development is not clear. Another pioneering woman architect, Leila Ross Wilburn (1885-1967), began her private practice in the Peters Building in downtown Atlanta in the first decade of the twentieth century. Leila Ross Wilburn (Courtesy of Susan H. Smith) ghe wa§ born in Macon, Georgia, in 1885, the oldest of five children of Leila Ada Ross and Joseph Gustavus Wilburn, who moved to Atlanta in the 1890s.22 After a year at Agnes Scott Institute and two years of apprenticeship as a draftsman in the Benjamin R. Padgett architectural and building firm, Leila Wilburn moved into her own office in 1908.23 Her practice was exclusively in residential architecture. Her work can be divided into two distinct periods, an early period from 1908-1920 and a later period from 1920-1967. In this early period Wilburn designed at least eighty single-family houses, photographs of which were included in her first plan book in 1914.24 She designed in this period at least twenty apartment houses (of six to twenty-two units) and twenty-four du­ plexes.25 Her practice coincided with Atlanta's residential expansion in the suburban parks of Inman Park, Ansley Park, Midtown, Boulevard, and Druid Hills at the turn of the century, and her houses can be docu­ mented in these new developments. She also designed six documented apartments in the northeast section at Juniper and Eighth, the Rosslyn (344 Ponce de Leon, 1913), The Regal Apartments (640 Boulevard, 1918), Piedmont Part Apartments (266 Eleventh Street, 1914), #829 Myrtle, North Apartments (60 Parkway Drive, 1920).26 The Regal and North Apartments were build after Atlanta's Great Fire of May 21, 1917, which devastated the northeast section of town. In an article assessing the progress and type of rebuilding that occurred in 1918 in the area, the Atlanta Journal reported, "Building operations so far in the burned dis­ trict indicate that it will largely be a community of apartment houses."27 This type of building accommodated residential needs of a middle class Journal — Winter 1979 91

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si^'t No

HIS stucco lions T ; arr&i

sun parlor. I

1 I • h~-I I r- -I' n ti i_3 L_| •> • - • 1T L if H^ I J..L _1 L

From Leila Ross Wilburn's 1914 pattern book, Southern Hornet and Bungalow* (Courtesy of Susan H. Smith) 92 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY as more office workers were employed in the city. The Royal Apartments, now a part of the Bedford-Pines rehabilita­ tion area, exemplify Wilburn's Craftsman style adapted to a six-unit structure. The Craftsman style was popularized by Gustav Stickley in his nationally distributed magazine, The Craftsman, and was influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement before World War I.28 The small side of the rectangular brick building faces the street with parallel porches rising three stories on the facade. A tiled mansard roof with brackets under the wide eaves caps the building. The central section of the side walls projects about a foot through the roofline, forming a deco­ rative half-timber detail at its height. The third story is stucco, providing a horizontal band contrasting with the two brick stories below. These details break an otherwise monotonous side elevation. A sleeping porch area with back stairs completes the back of the building and repeats the parallel division and central entry of the fagade. In her earlier Piedmont Park Apartments of twenty-two units she used the long side of the rectangular building to face the street, adapting to the lot size and shape. At the crest of Eleventh Street as it deadends at Piedmont Park, her three-story brick structure has four vertical porch towers across the facade with the bracketed mansard roof. Brackets also are used decoratively above the first and second-story porches. Bands of header bricks between the stretcher bond give a subtle horizontal defini­ tion around the structure. Wilburn worked for real estate developers, Ansley, Goldsmith, Reid and McCall and Rausenberg.29 Seven contractors and builders in Atlanta advertised in her 1914 pattern book, Southern Homes and Bungalows.3" Her practice was dependent on her contacts with the building trade and with real estate interests. Her duplexes, apartment buildings, and single houses were not among the prestigious buildings of the Southern Architect, a regional magazine founded in 1889 and edited by Thomas Morgan, but they were the vernacular stuff of Atlanta's real growth in the early twentieth century. Her modest architectual phi­ losophy of eclecticism was stated (rather ambiguously) in her first of seven plan books: This book is published with the idea of supplying Southern peo­ ple with homes suitable for cli­ matic conditions of the South­ east. . . . Here will be found plans for moderate-cost resi­ dences where the influence of the English half-timber cottage, the Swiss Chalet and the Mis­ Wilburn's The Rosslyn Apartments, 1913 31 sion Bungalow is felt. (Courtesy of Susan H. Smith) Journal — Winter 1979 93 Wilburn was publishing in the plan book tradition, revived in the 1890s by Edward Bok, editor of the Ladies Home Journal, from its 1860s origin in Godey's Lady's Book which published engravings and plans of houses from Downing's Country Residences.32 Wilburn's remaining work reflects her conscious adoption of the homey attitudes of the Ladies Home Journal and similar publications. She specifically states, however, that all the designs are her own.33 Leila Ross Wilburn worked as a civilian for the War Department in 1918 at Fort McPherson, and later in World War II she worked for three years as an engineering draftsman in Tampa, Florida, and in Washing­ ton, D.C.34 She is the earliest known woman architect in Georgia to have participated in a war effort and thus she set a precedent for later women who worked for the United States government in the 1940s. Her second period, from 1920-1967, continued her eclectic offerings, especially in the colonial styles, and included a switch from the earlier bungalow types to the ranch home popular after World War II. The first style is reflected in the bungalow she designed in a Decatur subdivision (125 Greenwood Place) in 1928 and the second is seen in her sketches in the later plan book, Ranch and Colonial Homes.35 She also became in­ creasingly interested in low-income single housing. Wilburn was an unconventional woman, designing and marketing her own product, conventional, domestic architecture. She never joined the A.I.A. It is interesting that in a 1924 interview in the Atlanta Journal in which she was labeled Atlanta's only woman architect, she expressed her dislike for women assistants in her office: "Women drive me dis­ tracted, sitting around waiting to be told what to do . . .1 find that men will not have to be told what is to be done."38 This is a telling comment from a woman who started as an assistant in a male firm. She put herself outside the general category of women, aligning herself with what she considered the male role of the self-starter. Her logic corresponds to that article's title, "Atlanta Women Have Man-Size Jobs," in its assumption of male authority in the professional world and of a woman's need to adopt a male attitude in order to be successful. However, in her plan books Wilburn made ref­ erence to her special capability "as a woman" to understand domestic planning.37 This be­ lief gave direct support to the thesis popularized by Catherine Beecher, home designer, home economist, and Christian theorist in the late nineteenth century. Wilburn's Piedmont Park Apartments, 1914 (Courtesy Susan H. Smith) 94 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY Beecher had proposed greater efficiency and sacrifice in home work, the natural "woman's sphere."38 The matching of woman architect and do­ mestic architecture was a natural association, one which Wilburn, in turn, stressed in her marketing rhetoric. Both Wilburn and Dozier were single women in private practice. According to the records they left behind, both appeared to be strong- willed. Their fathers left an impact upon their lives, as evidenced by Henrietta's nickname and by Wilburn's opening of her own practice in the year of her father's death. The necessity of economic survival is not known, but it was probably a factor along with the determination to practice architecture. Wilburn came into architecture through appren­ ticeship, Dozier through formal schools of architecture. Dozier's build­ ings include institutional and residential structures; Wilburn designed a variety of residential structures. The practices of Dozier and Wilburn mark the first phase of women in the architectural profession in Atlanta (1895-1920). The second phase (1920-1940) is characterized by a gap filled solely by Wilburn's continued residential practice. The third cycle (1940-1960) encompasses the group of June Wood Wicker, Miriam Toulmin Williams, Helen Coleman Greear, and Elizabeth Moore Ellis who entered architecture as the coun­ try entered World War II. The first woman in Atlanta practice to have received a college degree in architecture, June Wood Wicker was twenty-three when she received a B.A. from Oklahoma A&M in 1940. She worked the fall quarter of 1940 as "draftsman and secretary" at Brittelle and Grinner, Architects in Albuquerque, New Mexico, designing "small residences." From 1941- 1942 she listed herself as "draftsman" with an engineering firm in Phoe­ nix, Arizona, designing "army cantonments and sewage disposal plants." From 1942-1943 she was a draftsman for consulting engineers in Okla­ homa City working on "naval facilities." From 1943-1944 she worked with U. S. engineers in Recife, Brazil, on the airport development pro­ gram. During the latter years of World War II, Wicker moved to Atlanta from the Midwest. From 1944-1946 she worked with Bush-Brown and Gailey, Architects on the Georgia Tech campus development program (postwar planning).39 In 1946 she was an associate member and in 1948 a corporate member of the Atlanta A.I.A., and from 1947-1948 at age thirty-one she was an architectural draftsman with Cooper, Bond and Cooper, Atlanta.40 In the 1950s, three women, two of Wicker's generation, began work­ ing in Atlanta. All three held a bachelor's degree in architecture, two had taken a fifth year of education, and two of them had had civilian experi­ ence with the government. Miriam Toulmin Williams graduated with a B.A. degree from Alabama Polytechnic Institute in Auburn and worked in 1934 as a junior draftsman with Frank Lockwood, an architect in Montgomery.41 From 1937-1938 she did "drafting and general architec- Journal — Winter 1979 95 tural work of increasing scope and responsibility" in the office of Harry Inge Johnstone in her native city of Mobile. From 1940-1947 she was a principal in a young firm with Arch Winter and her husband Robert, all former Auburn students. The firm contracted to do the emergency de­ fense plan for Mobile, a large shipbuilding center for the United States Navy during World War II. Miriam Williams's career then began to develop in other directions. She moved to Atlanta during her divorce in 1951, and after five or six years as a draftsman in two Atlanta firms she began work with Andre Steiner, chief planner for Robert and Company. She also formed her own business, Urban-Rural Planners, which was responsible for the Federal 701 Planning Program which allowed funding for planning for small cities in Georgia. For a term she was appointed Chief Planner for the State under the enabling legislation of the 701 Program. She is presently a planner at Harland and Bartholomew and Associates, Atlanta.42 Another woman whose architectural studies coincided with World War II was Helen Coleman Greear. Greear finished the University of Washington Architectural School in 1947 but had worked during these years in naval architectural drafting at the shipyards in Seattle. "During my employment I did the original plumbing layout for the Y.R.D.'s floating work shops as well as many original piping details." She also worked for the Seattle Department of Buildings from January through March 1947 and from May to September of that year for Edwin J. Iwen. Incorporated, in Seattle, doing "working drawings for churches, details of a small residence, grocery store." From September to December she "took (a) forced two month holiday," and by December she was working for a dredging company in Seattle. In July 1948 she came to Atlanta, working for Robert and Company as an architectural draftsman. In 1950 she did the architectural working drawings for the Howell House and the Darlington Apartments for Lyles, Bissett, Carlisle and Wolff and then returned to work for Robert and Company.43 Another female architect in this era, Elizabeth Moore Ellis, received her B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1952. After graduat­ ing, she worked as a draftsman for C. P. Moore, Jr. and Associates and Harland and Bartholomew and Associates in St. Louis and Memphis. She moved to Atlanta in 1955, working as a draftsman for four firms within four years. In 1959 she became a corporate member ofthe Atlanta A.I.A. chapter. It appears from these vignettes that the Atlanta-associated women born during or immediately after World War I found their first working experiences in the drafting rooms ofthe U. S. government (Wicker, Wil­ liams, and Greear). Two of these architects became planners (Wicker and Williams). The fourth, Elizabeth Moore Ellis, born in 1930 in the depth of the Depression, pursued the role of draftsman. Only one woman architect (Williams) opened her own private office during the 1940-1960 96 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY period, and that was for a short term. Although the formal educational level was higher for this intermediate group and schools of architecture more accessible to women after 1920, this group was not as interested in establishing private practices as the earlier women architects. Part of this change was due to the influence of World War II with an increase in larger architectural firms. "One aspect of architectural practice that changed was the dramatic escalation of scale in organizational struc­ tures. Swept away with the 'Mom and Pop' store was the one-or-two- person office with its roster of carefully spelled, distinguished names. In its place emerged the corporate office with simple initials: IBM or TAC."44 The fourth phase in the history of women architects in Atlanta be­ longs to the last two decades, the 1960s and 1970s. Two features of this phase which are clearly different from the previous periods are the pres­ ence of many more women architects and their awareness of each other. The invitation list of a new organization, Woman Architects/Atlanta, shows thirty-two names of women practicing in Atlanta, thirteen regis­ tered in Georgia. The first convener of this organization was Ellen Don­ aldson. Monthly evening meetings in the homes of the architects have provided opportunities to socialize with other women in the field and to address specific topics in an informal forum. The first meeting in May 1979 introduced the idea of forming a women's group; other agendas focused on "establishing long-term career goals," "marriage, family and career" and "moonlighting." The general tradition within architecture of the lone, inspired architect and the specific examples of Atlanta's own historic women architects contrast with the collegiality at these meet­ ings. This conscious pooling of resources seems quite different from the earlier periods and is part of the climate established by two cultural phenomena of the 1970s: the women's movement and the technology of career training and development. The "Women in American Architec­ ture" exhibit in 1977 at the Brooklyn Museum stood as the first visible synthesis of these two aspects on the national level. The Atlanta organi­ zation draws on the influence of this event and such organizational mod­ els as the Alliance of Women in Architecture in New York. In a series of interviews, eight women architects in Atlanta were asked to define what kind of woman now enters the architectural profes­ sion. The interviewed women range in age from mid-twenties to mid- forties. Their work situations vary: three work at Heery & Heery, Archi­ tects and Engineers, a large firm; two work at Stevens & Wilkinson, Architects, Engineers, Planners; one is a full-time lecturer at Southern Technical Institute during the school year and an employee of Haley & Howard, Architects during the summer; one works at Aeck Associates; and one has recently opened her own full-time private practice. One of these women architects is black. The interview was divided into sections dealing chronologically with early motivation, influential people and Journal — Winter 1979 97 models, educational experience, job relationships, marriage and family status, and architectural concepts and structures.45 In discussing motivation and influential people, one architect re­ membered an early woman engineer, Dorothy Dugger, as a model profes­ sional woman. Another architect pointed to her architect father as a model and another to her contractor father. Of the eight architects, only two had working mothers while growing up. One of these two was an only child. Raised equitably by both working parents and surrounded by a larger extended family, she felt a natural ease in pursuing her career goals. The other architect's mother was a bookkeeper for the father's business. The great majority of these architects, therefore, had parents in the traditional role of the father as breadwinner and the mother as homemaker. Most of these women did not feel a conscious professional commitment to architecture until they were in architectural school. For these women in their peer relationships within their firms there was mainly a feeling of equality in responsibility and pay, although some had experienced and rectified unequal pay situations in the past. Since more women architects are entering their firms, their awareness of the "other" women is slowly increasing and the competitive reality of work­ ing in a man's world (or the male-dominated field of architecture) is becoming more complex. Most women assumed their competition was mainly with men, and they spoke to this issue with forthrightness. Some felt their own sense of ambition was not matched with the implementing skills that boys culturally acquire in their growing up in America: That is something we haven't learned; guys have a business sense to know how to bargain, improve their business situation. They know how to dele­ gate work better. We've been brought up to study well, "do it yourself," and do it well, but we don't learn to work in a group well. They learn shortcuts we never learned.48 It is interesting to note that the interviewer's question about peer rela­ tionships "between women architects" was not responded to until the question was repeated. This was interpreted as an indication of inexperi­ ence in working with women. Most architect-manager relationships experienced by the respon­ dents were women to men. Only one woman architect had experienced working for a woman manager and vice-versa. This is another indicator of the managerial status of women architects in Atlanta. Most women architects felt they were treated fairly and in some cases had been singled out as exemplary. Most of the women also felt that how a woman pre­ sented herself an an architect was the significant factor in her internal relationships in the firm and in her external client and contractor rela­ tionships. In one instance, the old arguments against women's profi­ ciency in site inspections was relieved by one younger woman in her early career when she saw an older woman architect performing that function efficiently. The degree of client and contractor contact varied within the 98 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Merrill Elams's Woodruff Medical Center Administration Building (Courtesy of Susan H. Smith) group. For example, a senior designer did not have these relationships because of the nature of a team approach. She worked strictly with design and other architects on the team made the contacts. Another of Journal — Winter 1979 gg the women architects felt she did excellent work "translating" between client and firm principals when there was a conflict of personalities. One expressed the difficulty of a woman working with foreign clients, espe­ cially in Arab nations where a woman's status differs drastically from that in the United States. The majority of women felt they were in charge of presenting themselves and their work in a way that would decrease any resistance and deter male flirtation, both of which could interrupt the progress of a job. In the area of marriage and family, an unusually large percentage of women architects were married to colleagues. For instance, six picked at random from the group of eight were married to architects and one was divorced from an architect. Comments on this kind of marriage ranged from a humorous "Well, that's all the men you see when you are in architecture" to a statement on the complementary merging of similar interests, to a recognition of the problems of advancement and authority within the same firm or within the same city. The youngest woman hoped for a small partnership firm with her husband. The women mar­ ried to colleagues felt the issues of competition and cooperation were ones that needed to be dealt with throughout married life when job placement and position and family concerns changed. With the introduction of the topic of children, the role of mother immediately surfaced as a considera­ tion equal to the career role. Questions of ambition, guilt, and alternative ways of parenting were raised. In the cases of two women with children, another woman from the previous generation, the grandmother, cared for the young children during working hours. Another woman architect, pregnant with her first child, planned a three-month leave of absence from the office, but was uncertain about her plans after that. The options for professional women combining marriage and career seemed laby- rinthian in their complexity of directions. No one way of dealing with the joint realities of family and career seemed clear to any of the women. In discussing domestic architecture, it became evident that only one ofthe women interviewed was working in this field (a moonlighting job). Most enjoyed the planning of large office buildings,, schools, hospitals, fire stations, recreational buildings. Some saw the design aspect of archi­ tecture as their main arena; others were excited about putting together a whole package, working with the construction and technical parts on multi-million dollar projects; still others were becoming increasingly in­ terested in the management and business concerns of architectural prac­ tice. Four of these architects saw a future middle-sized firm of their own with their husbands as partners. The question has been raised why there have been no great Atlanta women architects and no large firms with women as principals. The more feminist critics reply that cultural conditioning has thwarted this devel­ opment. Others, like Marcel Breuer, architect for Atlanta's new public library, believe that "the biggest problem of all is the biological story. 100 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Rendering of Bessie Stephenson's Elberton/Elbert County Hospital (Courtesy of Susan H. Smith) Being married, being a mother is a full-time job. Somehow liberation women do not want to recognize it."47 The either/or choice here appears to be solely a personal issue or at least an issue which women claim for themselves. Mr. Breuer does not claim a male imperative between career and fatherhood. He does not say that being a father is a full-time job. Ofthe eight women architects interviewed, three are mothers, one a step­ mother. Two of the three mothers were the single parent providing total support for their children. Economic conditions did not allow them the choice of being a "full-time" mother. None ofthe eight considered moth­ erhood a deterrent to career. They did not feel as women at the beginning of the century that marriage and family would have to be forfeited for career. The zone of uncertainty in the question of marriage and family centered around male and female roles in the home rather than on the biology of reproduction. The women of the interview did not feel that cultural conditioning was keeping them from advancement in their profession. The group is relatively young, in their early thirties. The next two decades will deter­ mine if their ambitions and skills place them in the forefront of architec­ ture in Atlanta. Will they join the most prominent woman architect in Georgia, Ellamae Ellis League from Macon, as a leader in the profes­ sion, as a Fellow in the A.I.A., as president of the Atlanta chapter? The present record suggests that there are young women architects ready to assume that leadership in the 1980s. A shining example is Merrill Elam, at thirty-six a senior designer with Heery & Heery. Elam designed two major Atlanta public schools and Emory's bold Woodruff Medical Center Journal — Winter 1979 101 administration building. She was project designer for the Greater Cincin­ nati Airport and the Georgia Power Company corporate headquarters. As a group, Women Architects/Atlanta does not have the direct political motivation of the nothern women's organization. The agendas of the Atlanta organization are social, low-key, career-oriented, and network-building. Some women are skeptical, sensing an isolation from the mainstream of architecture or an unwanted identification with the women's movement in general. Some women feel that this organization is a valuable temporary structure allowing women to build themselves into better professionals. The present is, after all, the first decade in Atlanta's history when a good number of women are employed as archi­ tects; and after a century of slow progress, they are becoming more visible in firms, in schools, to each other, and to the profession. For the first time in this century in Atlanta, women architects repre­ sent a healthy, growing minority, one which threatens to be a majority within Georgia Tech's School of Architecture. The future of women ar­ chitects looks bright in terms of increased numbers, mutual influence, and individual recognition. The single, stalwart woman architect ofthe turn of the century has been replaced by a cadre of women architects working in the city's corporate architectural offices. Atlanta, the capital city of the New South, is the apt setting for this rising phenomenon of professionalism in southern women.

APPENDIX

Person: Barbara Crum Firm: Architect, Heery & Heery, Architects and Engineers Born: Washington, D.C., 1949 Registered: A.I.A. Project: Greenville Hospital System—Master Planning Location: Greenville, South Carolina Client: Greenville Hospital System Role: Team member participating in preparation of presentation documents for master planning effort. Project: Cancer Treatment Center Location: Greenville, South Carolina Client: Greenville Hospital System Cost: $1.6 million Completion: 1978 Role: Designer participating in space planning and architectural de­ tailing along with senior designer, Bob Guinn. Project: Georgia Power Location: Atlanta, Georgia Client: Georgia Power Company 102 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Cost: $37.5 million Completion: 1981 Role: Participating project designer involved in architectural design and space planning, model coordination and design phase presentation drawings, construction documents, and interior architectural coordination and detailing.

Person: Ellen Donaldson Firm: Architect, private practice Born: Atlanta, Georgia, 1945 Registered: A.I.A.

Person: Meda DuBose Firm: Architect, Aeck Associates, Architects Born: Columbus, Georgia, 1950 Registered: A.I.A. Project: Twin Office Towers Location: Atlanta, Georgia Client: Georgia State Finance and Investment Commission Cost: $39 million Completion: In progress Role: Working drawings, coordination of exterior window wall. Project: First National Bank of Commerce, Jefferson Office Location: Jefferson, Georgia Client: First National Bank of Commerce Completion: 1979 Role: Project architect, client contact, design development, working drawings, and construction supervision. Project: J. C. Booth Junior High School Location: Peachtree City, Georgia Client: Fayette County Board of Education Cost: $2.5 million Completion: 1978 Role: Team member, working drawings, color selection and graphics Project: Fort Gordon Master Planning Location: Fort Gordon, Georgia Client: Savannah District Corps of Engineers Completion: 1974 Role: Project architect, revised master plan, site-planned all proposed facilities, programmed selected facilities.

Person: Merrill Elam Firm: Senior Designer, Heery & Heery, Architects and Engineers Born: Nashville, Tennessee, 1943 Registered: A.I.A. Journal — Winter 1979 103 Project: Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School Location: Atlanta, Georgia Client: Atlanta Board of Education Cost: $4.7 million Completion: 1973 Role: Senior designer Project: Crestwood High School Location: Atlanta, Georgia Client: Fulton County Board of Education Cost: $2.5 million Completion: 1971 Role: Senior designer Project: Greater Cincinnati Airport Location: Covenington, Kentucky Client: Kenton County Board of Aviation Cost: $25 million Completion: 1975 Role: Participating project designer for new terminal facilities work­ ing with overall project design coordinator, Mack Scogin. Project: Shelby County Jail Location: Columbiana, Alabama Client: Shelby County Commission Cost: $2.1 million Completion: 1978 Role: Senior designer Project: Woodruff Medical Center Administration Building Location: Atlanta, Georgia Client: Emory University Cost: $7 million Completion: 1976 Role: Senior designer Project: Georgia Power Company Corporate Headquarters Office Building Location: Atlanta, Georgia Client: Georgia Power Company Cost: $37.5 million Completion: 1981 Role: Participating senior designer, working with overall project design coordinator, Mack Scogin.

Person: Mary Gunn Firms: Lecturer, Southern Technical Institute, Marietta, Georgia, Private practice, Haley & Howard, Architects Born: Atlanta, Georgia, 1934 Registered: Project: Georgia Power Building 104 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY Location: Macon, Georgia Client: Georgia Power Company Cost: $4 million Completion: ca. 1967 Role: Job captain, Finch, Alexander, Barnes, Rothchild & Parchal (FABRAP) Project: Corporate Headquarters, Gulf States Paper Company Location: Tuscaloosa, Alabama Client: Gulf States Paper Company Cost: $3.7 million Completion: ca. 1969 Role: Job captain, FABRAP Project: Extensive addition and alteration P.P.G. paint plant Location: East Point, Georgia Client: P.P.G. Cost: $4 million Completion: 1970-1971 Role: Project architect, Lockwood-Dreene, Engineers and Architects Project: Public Facilities (swim club, store and restaurant), Big Canoe Location: Big Canoe, Georgia Client: Big Canoe Completion: 1974 Role: Associate architect, W. Caldwell Smith, Architect.

Person: Sheila Mclntyre Firm: Heery & Heery, Architects and Engineers Born: Durham, North Carolina, 1952 Associate Member: A.I.A. Project: Camp Shady Pines Master Plan and Lodging Facilities Location: North Attelboro, Massachusetts Client: Plymouth Bay Girl Scout Council, Inc. Role: Project designer and coordinator, John D. Latimer Associates Project: Baltimore Gas & Electric Company Energy Control Center Location: Baltimore, Maryland Client: Baltimore, Maryland Completion: December 1980 Role: Production and coordination of design development, drawings, and contract documents. Project: Georgia Power Company Corporate Headquarters Office Building Location: Atlanta, Georgia Client: Georgia Power Company Cost: $37.5 million Completion: 1981 Role: Production of contract documents and owner review. Journal — Winter 1979 105 Person: Bessie Stephenson Firm: Stevens & Wilkinson, Architects, Engineers, Planners Born: Henderson, Kentucky, 1947 Registered: Project: Medical Clinical Services Building Location: Augusta, Georgia Client: Medical College of Georgia Cost: $12 million Completion: 1975 Role: Team member Project: Renovation and additions to the Skychefs Concession Location: Cincinnati Airport Client: Skychefs Cost: $2 million Completion: 1974 Role: Job captain Project: Woodruff Medical Administration Building Location: Atlanta, Georgia Client: Emory University Cost: $7 million Completion: 1976 Role: Team member Project: Fannin County Regional Hospital Location: Blue Ridge, Georgia Client: Fannin County Cost: $2 million Completion: 1977 Role: Job captain Project: Farah Royal Jordanian Rehabilitation Center Location: King Hussein Medical Centre, Amman, Jordan Client: Royal Jordanian Army Medical Corp. Cost: $14.3 million Completion: 1981 Role: Project designer Project: Ambucare Day Surgery Center Location: Tallahasse and Tampa, Florida Client: Ambucare, International Cost: $.8 million each Completion: 1978 Role: Project designer Project: Florence Hand Home Location: LaGrange, Georgia Client: West Georgia Medical Center Cost: $3.5 million Completion: 1980 Role: Project architect 106 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY Project: Elberton, Elbert County Hospital Location: Elberton, Georgia Client: Elberton, Elbert County Hospital Cost: $4 million Completed: Defeated bond referendum Role: Project designer

Person: Silvia Townes Firm: Stevens & Wilkinson Born: Birmingham, Alabama, 1948 Project: Central Municipal Garage Facilities Location: Atlanta, Georgia Client: City of Atlanta Cost: $3 million Completion: 1975 Role: Project architect, J. W. Robinson and Associates, Architects Project: Boyton Village and Apartments and Capitol Vanira Apartments Location: Atlanta, Georgia Client: Interface Cost: Boyton—$.8 million Capitol Vanira—$.9 million Completion: 1977 Role: Project architect, J. W. Robinson and Associates, Architects Project: Bankhead Court and Perry Homes Community Centers Location: Atlanta, Georgia Client: Atlanta Housing Authority Cost: Bankhead—$.9 million Perry Homes—$1.2 million Completion: 1977 Role: Project architect, J. W. Robinson and Associates, Architects Project: Dixie Hills Baptist Church and Friendship Baptist Church Location: Atlanta, Georgia Client: Baptist Church Cost: $.2 million each Completion: 1973 Role: Project architect, J. W. Robinson and Associates, Architects Project: J. C. Penney Department Store Location: Wilmington, North Carolina Client: J. C. Penney Cost: $2.5 million Completion: 1979 Role: Project architect, Stevens & Wilkinson, Architects, Engineers, Planners Journal — Winter 1979 107 NOTES

1. Susana Torre, eds., Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1977), pp. 55, 115. 2. Georgia State Board for Examination, Qualification and Registration of Architects, Records from 1920-1978. 3. Atlanta Chapter of the Georgia Association of the American Institute of Architects, Records from 1906-1978. 4. Thomas H. Morgan, "The Georgia Chapter ofthe American Institute of Architects," The Atlanta Historical Bulletin VTI (September, 1943): 90. 5. Georgia Institute of Technology, enrollment records from 1959-1979. 6. Girls High School Alumnae Roster, 1895, 1908, 1912; Atlanta, Georgia, City Directory (1878), p. 171. 7. Girls High School Alumnae Roster, 1895, 1908, 1912. 8. The Atlanta Constitution, 4 August 1895, p. 6. 9. Walter G. Cooper, The Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated (At­ lanta: The Illustrator Company, 1896), pp. 52-53. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 54. 12. Ibid., p. 55. 13. Ibid., p. 56. 14. Ibid., p. 54. The Florida Times-Union, 18 July 1976. 15. Ibid. 16. Morgan, pp. 95-99. 17. The Florida Times-Union, 18 July 1976. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. American Institute of Architects notes to Susan Hunter Smith, 1978. 22. Llewellyn Wilburn, Family Geneology, 1978. 23. Atlanta, Georgia, City Directory (1909), p. 2069. 24. Leila Ross Wilburn, Southern Homes and Bungalows (n.p., 1914). 25. Leila Ross Wilburn, Film Book I and II. 26. Three of these structures were identified in photographs by Franklin Garrett, Atlanta Historical Society. These three and the others' identifications were confirmed on their sites by the author, July, 1979. 27. The Atlanta Journal, 17 August 1918. 28. Lyon, p. 77. 29. Notations in Wilburn's Film Book I. 30. Wilburn, Southern Homes, p. 93. 31. Ibid., p. 3. 32. Russell Lynes, The Taste Makers (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949). p. 177. 33. Leila Ross Wilburn, Ideal Homes of Today (n.p.: n.d.), p. 2. 34. U. S. General Services Administration, National Personnel Records Center, Tran­ script/Statement of Federal Service, 30 January 1979. 108 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

35. Leila Ross Wilburn, Ranch and Colonial Homes (n.p.: n.d.). 36. The Atlanta Journal, 24 August 1924, p. 7. 37. Wilburn, Ideal Homes, introduction. 38. Torre, p. 40. 39. Georgia State Board, Registration #585, 20 April 1945. 40. American Institute of Architects, Admission Record, 1948. 41. Georgia State Board, Registration #826, 30 October 1951. 42. Miriam Toulmin Williams, telephone interview, 29 July 1979. 43. Georgia State Board, Registration #887, 6 October 1953. 44. Torre, p. 41. 45. See Appendix for a listing of interviewees and their works. 46. Barbara Crum, interview, 17 May 1979. 47. The New York Times, 11 April 1971, p. 60. Booh Reuietus

William Knox, The Life & Thought of an Eighteenth Century Imperialist. By Leland J. 3ellot. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977. Pp. xii, 264. Biblio., index, $14.95.) Best remembered as undersecretary of state in the American De­ partment of the British government from 1770 to 1782, William Knox was not a great political leader since he never held a top executive posi­ tion, never served in Parliament, never was regarded as the leader of a political faction, and never commanded widespread popular support. Neither was Knox a "minor politician," as one recent scholar has classed him. A more accurate appraisal would place him somewhere between those extremes, for he was a useful public servant who participated in the most important events of late eighteenth-century British political and imperial history and who undoubtedly exerted some influence upon imperial decisions emanating from Whitehall. Additionally, he was a prolific writer of pamphlets on British imperialism and Calvinistic theol­ ogy. Knox had a singular advantage over many British imperial thinkers since he had actually lived in the colonies for many years. Indeed he served a lengthy political apprenticeship in Georgia before joining George Grenville's faction in England. His political career began when he arrived in Georgia in 1757 as provost marshal ofthe colony. In dealing with the manifold economic, political, and military problems confronting His Majesty's youngest and perhaps weakest American colony, Knox gained valuable experience that would later be put to good use. Able and ambitious, he subsequently grew weary of Georgia and aspired for a more challenging and remunerative position in England. In 1762 he was ap­ pointed Georgia's colonial agent in England, a position he filled capably until Georgians learned that he was the author of The Claim of the Colonies, a pamphlet which vigorously supported Grenville's new colo­ nial policy, including the hated Stamp Act. As a result of that publica­ tion, Knox's political ties with Georgia were severed abruptly. There­ after, his talents were employed in upholding the British position in ensuing controversies between England and her American colonies. In William Knox, The Life & Thought of an Eighteenth Century Imperialist, Leland Bellot is to be commended for synthesizing a vast amount of tedious material into a concise and interesting biography. From the biographical perspective Bellot deftly explains the intricacies 110 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY and the personal nature of the British political system without getting hopelessly bogged down in details, which is no easy task. He also avoids the biographer's temptation to overemphasize his subject's strengths or weaknesses. Consequently, Knox emerges as a real person, strongly influ­ enced by his Scotch-Irish upbringing and Calvinist heritage, beset with heavy family responsibilities and chronic health problems, and often torn between his abstract views of the empire and his personal invest­ ments in Georgia. Based on extensive research in American and British archives, this is the first biography of Knox. There should be no need for another for many years. James F. Cook Floyd Junior College

The Genteel Gentile: Letters of Elizabeth Cumming, 1857-1858. Edited by Ray R. Canning and Beverly Beeton. (Salt Lake City, Utah: Univer­ sity of Utah Library, 1977. Pp. 111. $12.50.) The first non-Mormon to serve as governor ofthe Utah Territory was a Georgian, Alfred Cumming. He came from a prominent family in Au­ gusta, where he was mayor in 1849. Cumming married Elizabeth Randall of Boston. She was also from a distinguished family which included Samuel Adams. This brief volume is comprised of letters from Elizabeth Randall Cumming to two sisters-in-law, Anne and Sarah. The letters were writ­ ten during the period beginning in the fall of 1857 while she traveled with her husband to assume his new post. Because of the tensions which existed between the Mormon leadership and the government, Cumming was escorted by 2500 federal troops and 1000 civilian government em­ ployees. The editors of the volume explain that their goal is to "contribute to our historical and sociological understanding of the frontier, the army, and Mormon society." Indeed, Elizabeth Cumming's letters make a sig­ nificant contribution to our understanding ofthe period. Her perspective of military camp life, the controversies in which her husband was em­ broiled, and the religious and social environment of Utah in the 1850s is unique, and her letters are insightful. The Cumming letters effectively reveal the disharmony among gov­ ernment leaders regarding their stance toward the Mormons. Governor Cumming wished to handle the conflict in a conciliatory way; working through an intermediary, he was successful in doing so. But, as his wife was well aware, a military confrontation was preferred by the chief mili­ tary officer, Colonel Johnston, and also by Judge Delana Eckels. Mrs. Cumming charged that while her husband was meeting with Mormon Journal — Winter 1979 -Ql leaders to settle the conflict peacefully, Judge Eckels presented charges against Mormon polygamists before a federal grand jury and issued warrants to have Brigham Young arrested for treason. She confided to her sister-in-law that if the church leaders had realized what the judge was doing, her husband "would have had a hundred bullets in him in less than ten minutes." The tolerance of the governor and his wife toward the Mormons and what she described as their "peculiar institution" is further shown by her favorable appraisal of church leaders when she met them for the first time. "They were," she observed, "full of politeness .... Nearly all . . . have been missionaries in various parts of Europe . . . and their manners are polished and the conversations of these gentlemen is very varied and interesting. . . ." It was indeed a series of unusual circumstances which brought a Boston socialite, by way of Augusta, to a military camp in the Rockies and to the governor's residence in territorial Utah. But this rare combi­ nation of experiences gave Elizabeth Cumming a depth of perspective which enriches her letters and clearly heightens our understanding of the period. The editors are to be commended for publishing this volume. Michael A. Petersen Clayton Junior College

The Houses of James Means. Mrs. John Ray Efird, Editor and Designer; Mrs. Ralph L. Toon, Jr., Coordinator; Rob Wheless, Photographer. (Atlanta, Ga.: The Conger Printing and Publishing Co., 1979. Pp. 100. $15.00.) A project for the benefit ofthe American Cancer Society, Fulton County Unit. The Houses of James Means is a visual treat. Indeed, after a perusal of this fine book dealing with residential architecture, one cannot escape the conviction that Means's clients must derive a special pleasure from their carefully and beautifully designed habitations. Forty-five distinctive southern homes are presented in this well de­ signed and printed book through exterior and interior photography, ele­ vations, and easily comprehended architectural drawings. A number of color plates constitute icing on the cake. James Means had a flair for finding and obtaining unusual and desirable materials from old buildings, residential and commercial, about to be demolished. Then with rare ingenuity he incorporated these materials into many of his houses, thereby giving them extra charm and distinction. From 1950 until his death in 1979, he was responsible for forty-nine houses and nine major remodelings. Although James Means practiced 112 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY architecture for over fifty years, it is ironic that he never was a registered architect, for without formal training he was unable to pass the struc­ tural engineering elements in the state examination. Maybe it was just as well. All too many recent buildings appear to have been calculated by engineers rather than having had their origin in the creative mind of a gifted person as exemplified by James Means. Franklin M. Garrett Atlanta Historical Society

After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism. By Paul D. Escott. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer­ sity, 1978. Pp. xiv, 295. Biographical notes, references and index. $17.50.) Paul D. Escott has written a long-overdue evaluation of the embat­ tled president of the southern confederacy. Escott's Jefferson Davis is a grim man, duty-bound to a role he detests, and impatient (and tactless) with those whom he judges to fall short of the high standard of selfless devotion to southern nationalism to which he himself subscribes. After Secession is a delightfully concise account of Jefferson Davis the man—an intensely private man. It is also a study of Davis the states­ man. No effort is made to build a case for or against Davis; rather, a reasonable evaluation is made of each of his major personal and public characteristics supported by the marshalling of convincing evidence in each instance. Escott allows the chips to fall where they may. The reader will agonize with Davis as the South in 1861 propels itself, with almost suicidal recklessness, toward a war it cannot hope to win. It is here, early in the war, that Davis's leadership is most effective as he skillfully re­ strains the feverish enthusiasm for war and directs much of this energy toward the more constructive and imperative goal of building the fabric of a new sense of nation. But Escott's book is far more than a personal presidential biography. It functions more deeply as a superlative documentary on the substance of the people who comprised that generation of white southerners. He describes the planters whose inability to surrender the trappings of privi­ lege even with their world crumbling set them at President Davis's throat barely six months after the war began; the demogogues and political opportunists such as Joe Brown and Zeb Vance whose obstructionist policies almost certainly hampered the Confederate military effort; and the bitter non-planter, white southern majority whose personal suffering and wartime deprivations far exceeded anything experienced by the planter class and were almost entirely ignored by the Davis government. Southern people were in need of a healing peace to restore the fabric of a class-torn society; instead they got war. Journal — Winter 1979 113 In the final analysis, Escott has written a book well worth reading. In seeking an understanding of Jefferson Davis, he has provided us with an excellent study of the cross section of wartime southern society. The writing is excellent. One comes away from Escott's work with the feeling that a better acquaintance has been struck with a wartime people and their leader. Philip L. Secrist Southern Technical Institute

The Regional Imagination: The South and Recent American History. By Dewey W. Grantham. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1979. Pp. xiv, 269. Notes and index. $11.95.) Aside from a short article on the Bourbons, the remaining thirteen essays that comprise this volume focus on the South in the twentieth century. All but three were published previously, and they appear here without substantial revision. The author prefaces each with a brief intro­ duction explaining the circumstances under which it was written and citing some works that have appeared on the subject since the essay's initial appearance. With two exceptions, the essays offer important com­ mentary on the twentieth-century South, and they warrant publication in a single volume. The two exceptions address the subject of violence, one on the assas­ sinations of William Goebel, Narciso G. Gonzales, and Edward Ward Cormack, the other on the Black Patch War. In addition to adding little to previous accounts of those events, Professor Grantham's treatment does not say anything about violence as a regional phenomenon. He fails, for example, to explain why the murders of Goebel, Gonzales, and Cor­ mack differed from assassinations in other parts of the nation. In place of his brief narrative description of the Black Patch War, the author might have provided fresh insight by approaching this episode of collec­ tive violence along the lines pioneered by George Rude and E. J. Hobs- bawm. Far more valuable are Grantham's essays on the experiences of black southerners and the impact of race on regional politics. Professor Gran­ tham used Theodore Roosevelt's famous dinner with Booker T. Washing­ ton in 1901 to illustrate the persistence of southern sectionalism and racism at the beginning of the century. "Southern Progressives and the Racial Imperative" presents a sound synthesis of the major historical works on the forces of racism and reform in the South during the Progres­ sive Era. Essays originally published as introductions for Ray Stannard Baker's Following the Color Line and Ralph J. Bunche's The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR provide valuable commentary on 114 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY the state of race relations in the first and fourth decades of the century. In reexamining the Little Rock school crisis, the author demonstrates the continuation of racism as a powerful force in the middle of the century, and he uses that episode to explore the intense period of southern sec­ tionalism that came in the wake of the Brown decision. Professor Grantham is strongest in writing about politics. In his 1961 essay calling for a reappraisal of the Bourbons, he suggested approaches which strongly influenced some of the works that have subsequently appeared on that subject. In analyzing Hoke Smith's senatorial career during the Wilson administration, the author examined the relation be­ tween southern sectionalism and national politics during an important period of political history. The two most valuable essays, "The South and the Politics of Sectionalism" and "The South and the Reconstruc­ tion of American Politics," explore two ofthe most fundamental themes in twentieth-century southern politics, one being the continuity of south­ ern distinctiveness which remained so strong in the first half of the cen­ tury, the other being the decline of southern distinctiveness which be­ came more pronounced after 1950. Jimmy Carter's election to the presi­ dency in 1976, Professor Grantham concludes, may have completed the Americanization of southern politics. There are also essays on the development of the social sciences in the South and on the historiography ofthe post-World War II era. Collec­ tively these essays offer important insight into southern history and into the relation between regional and national developments in shaping American history. This volume deserves a place along side George Tin­ dall's Disruption of the Solid South and The Persistent Tradition in New South Politics. William F. Holmes University of Georgia

The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870. By James H. Kettner. (Chapel Hill, N.C: Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Pp. xi, 391. $20.00.) James Kettner's Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870 is a welcome exception to studies in intellectual history that are defined by end points taken from conventional political periodization. Instead, Kettner has explored the idea of American citizenship from its English roots through its articulation in constitutional law in the aftermath ofthe Civil War. It is primarily a study in legal history and represents an important contribution to this relatively neglected field. A student of Bernard Bailyn, Kettner's position on early American history and his debt to Bailyn, in particular, are evident in his attention to the English Journal — Winter 1979 115 influence, in his respect for intellectual history, and in his argument that pre-Civil War American history was heavily influenced by the colonial experience. The central idea of British citizenship was perpetual allegiance of subject to king. Edward Coke had articulated the concept in Calvin's Case (1608), and it survived John Locke's restatement of the principles of government. Although government now rested on a social contract rather than on a natural hierarchy, subjects owed the sovereign lifelong allegiance. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century sovereignty underwent an institutional revolution in the relationship between king and Parlia­ ment, which had a critical impact on the status of the colonies and the colonists' emerging ideas of citizenship. If allegiance were perpetual, the process of naturalization repre­ sented the theft of another sovereign's subject. English jurists tended to concentrate on naturalization as a method of rendering an alien equiva­ lent to a native-born subject before the king. Peopled entirely by mi­ grants, the colonies approached the idea of citizenship from the perspec­ tives of the individual and of naturalization. Thus, the contractual di­ mension of the concept assumed primacy, and citizenship was under­ stood as volitional rather than perpetual. No rift with English tradition was apparent, and colonists simultaneously cherished their allegiance to the king even while they considered allegiance to have stemmed from a contract resting on consent. Citizenship was central to the Revolutionary debate over the colo­ nies' relationship to king and Parliament. Even after the colonies termi­ nated their allegiance to the Empire, the concept of citizenship was fraught with ambiguity. At what point did allegiance to the state become active and did former loyalty to the king become treason to the new government? If citizenship was based on consent, how did one break the contract through expatriation? Finally, which entity dominated—the state or the new central government? The issue of loyalty and treason was fairly precisely stated in the new state constitutions, but the resolu­ tion of jurisdiction and expatriation was worked out in the first half of the nineteenth century. The process of working out these issues is the subject of the final chapters ofthe book. Here, Kettner traced the implications ofthe princi­ ple of volitional citizenship and the resolution of attendant controversy through critical antebellum cases, including the Dred Scott case, and appropriately ended his study in 1870 when the principle of expatriation was firmly established in constitutional law. At this time federal primacy and black citizenship were also acknowledged. Although sensitive to the social context of the law, Kettner's treat­ ment of social questions is sketchy in contrast to his acute and detailed reading of colonial and Revolutionary sources. He did not, for example, investigate the question of woman suffrage and citizenship in the con- 116 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY text of black citizenship and suffrage, although feminism and abolition­ ism and black civil rights were closely linked (see Ellen DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 1978). Nor did Kettner unravel the ambiguity of how rights are related to citizenship: was citizenship defined in terms of rights or the other way around, and how were those defining rights determined? No book can be all things to all men. If Kettner neglected certain social questions related to his study, it came as a result of careful elucida­ tion of his theme of volitional citizenship and its history in American political and legal institutions. Amy Friedlander Agnes Scott College

DELTA: The History of an Airline. By W. David Lewis and Wesley Phillips Newton. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1979. Pp. 503. Notes, photographs, maps, appendices, bibliography and index. $15.00.) W. David Lewis and Wesley Phillips Newton, two historians from Auburn University, have written a first-class study of Atlanta's premier airline. Indeed, DELTA: The History of an Airline is so well done that it will probably inspire and serve as a model for other business histories. Furthermore, it is a convincing argument that business and economic histories do not have to put readers to sleep. Suspicions that DELTA might be a company document celebrating its fiftieth anniversary are quickly laid to rest by the authors. The work is thorough and comprehensive. It is based on numerous interviews with past and present Delta employees as well as on the company's volumi­ nous records. The objectivity ofthe study supports the authors' conten­ tion that it "is the first history of an American commercial airline to be written by professional historians having full access to business records, correspondence, and personnel of the corporation involved." Lewis and Newton's chronicle begins with the Huff Daland Dusters, a crop-dusting operation centered in Monroe, Louisiana, out of which grew the Delta Air Service in 1928. From the beginning, the genius and driving force in the venture was C. E. Woolman, a former Louisiana county agent with a degree in agriculture from the University of Illinois. It was Woolman who gave Delta its strategy and style up until his death in 1966. Like most successful businessmen, he was totally dedicated to his enterprise. But more than most, he was also dedicated to the rank and file employees. He made a point of calling most of the mechanics and clerks by their first names, and he frequently toured the Delta circuit inquiring about family and friends. It was this "family feeling," contend Lewis and Newton, that has helped make Delta "unique" in the airline Journal — Winter 1979 H7 industry. This characteristic, together with good management and a little luck, helped Delta expand from a small crop-dusting business and re­ gional carrier to one ofthe nation's domestic "Big Five" companies. But Delta's early history held out little promise that it could ever compete successfully with the larger, established airlines. Woolman and his asso­ ciates were frequently frustrated in their efforts to obtain lucrative air­ mail subsidies, and in the 1930s Delta was excluded from the potentially valuable route systems awarded by the federal government to American, Eastern, TWA, and United. After returning to crop dusting in order to survive the early depression years, the plucky little airline staged a dra­ matic comeback. In addition to sound management, the airline was blessed with good fortune; for example, it decided against the ill-fated Electras when the Lockheed Corporation couldn't promise timely deliv­ ery of the plane. Finally, two mergers, the first with Carleton Putnam's Chicago and Southern in 1953 and the second with Northeast in 1972, helped bring Delta the greatness it richly deserved. By 1974 the firm's profit was $90.6 million, a record high for the airline industry to that date. Today, Delta is clearly the most consistently profitable airline in the nation. DELTA is also the story of the rise of commercial aviation in the United States. A good deal of information is provided about the econom­ ics and politics of competing airlines, especially about Delta's arch-rival, Eastern. It is a credit to Lewis and Newton's style that the reader be­ comes interested in knowing more about Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern or Juan Trippe of Pan American. In short, Lewis and Newton have put a lot into this book, making it well worth reading. A special citation, too, should go to the University of Georgia Press for its fine job of editing. Robert Fischer Southern Technical Institute

Harold Martin Remembers a Place in the Mountains. Illustrated by Bill Darth. (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, Ltd., 1979. Pp. x, 166. $10.98.) I've never really met Harold Martin. Apart from a friendly nod when our paths crossed at the Atlanta Historical Society, my contact with this "institution" (a term I use in the most admiring sense) has been through his work. To be more specific, I know Martin the historian. Having come late to Georgia, I have discovered only now his earlier writings, those that established him as one of the state's premier journalists and essayists. Peachtree Publishers, Ltd. has published in this volume a collection of 118 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY his Atlanta Constitution articles, and I have gained a new admiration for a writer, a region, and the descriptive beauty of the English language. Martin's prose stands as a persuasive argument against the Oscar Wilde dictum that "Literature is unread, Journalism unreadable." Here is a writer who can paint pictures with words, camera characters, evoke every emotion from fear (of an approaching storm), to rage (at the "jerk" who killed the white heron simply for the joy of killing), to peace and contentment (which comes with the knowledge that one is part of a succession of seasons as endless and enduring as those mountains 100 miles and a thousand years north of Buckhead). Harold Martin is a romantic in the best sense of that literary tradition. He stirs emotions, memories, and dreams, leaving his reader resolved to spend the weekend well north of where the MARTA buses run. Rather than bemused ramblings of a "city-slicker," Martin's essays are perceptive observations of events, people, and places with which his readers can readily identify—the product of a simple, yet complex talent that separates the exceptional writer from the mediocre. As a result, the articles take on a unity that transcends geographic boundaries. Animals assume human characteristics (like the "papa bass" teaching his young to avoid the hook), storms and seasons mark the scenes, and the moun­ tains set the stage for the drama Martin describes so well. People, of course, are also present, but their part is measured and minor. Nature is the star, to which all due homage is paid. Illustrated by Bill Darth, whose watercolors and line drawings com­ plement the author's description, the book is handsomely presented and will be an enjoyed addition to any library. For those who remember Harold Martin the columnist, this volume will be a reunion with an old friend. For those, like this reviewer, who never knew that phase of his career, the satisfaction is equally deep. Harold Martin and I may never do more than nod across a room, but after reading this book, I know I have found a friend. Harvey H. Jackson Clayton Junior College

John Taylor Wood: Sea Ghost of the Confederacy. By Royce Gordon Shingleton. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979. Pp. xiv, 242. $15.00.) The Civil War gave rise to a number of persistent legends which have come to summarize neatly a protracted and complicated military effort. For example, Lee's words about "unsurpassed courage and forti­ tude" versus "overwhelming numbers and resources" have for genera­ tions represented the tradition of the southern army. The legend of the Journal — Winter 1979 119 Confederate navy runs along similar lines, perhaps expressed in the phrase "short on vessels, long on valor." Such names as Raphael Semmes, James Waddell, and Isaac Brown have customarily typified the daring captain who flouted the odds and made good. Now Royce Gordon Shingleton has given us another name to add to the list: Captain J. Taylor Wood, C.S.N. The exploits of this swashbuckler in gray make for a dramatic narra­ tive. In the spring of 1862, as gunner aboard the ironclad Virginia, Wood participated in the famous fight against the Monitor. Later at Drewry's Bluff he helped to repel the Union flotilla advancing up the James to­ ward Richmond. But Wood gained notoriety—especially among the enemy—with his "cutting out" expeditions. In the tradition of Stephen Decatur at Tripoli, he supervised the building of small craft for use in boarding raids upon Union merchant vessels. The earliest of these opera­ tions resulted in the capture of two merchantmen off the Virginia coast. And in mid-1863, Wood's raiders seized two gunboats and three schoon­ ers in the Chesapeake. Six months later he took and destroyed another enemy warship near New Bern, North Carolina. Even these successes pale when set beside Wood's career as commander of the Confederate commerce raider Tallahassee: in one month of cruising the north Atlan­ tic he captured more than thirty northern vessels. In recounting these adventures, Professor Shingleton's prose is color­ ful and spirited. Indeed, its lively pace befits these adventures on the high seas; much good fun is to be had from this reading. At those times when the action lapses, however, the author is prone to make those slight grammatical errors—faulty parallel, unclear pronoun reference, split in­ finitive—which tend to mar a text. Moreover, it is a reviewer's perverse prerogative to protest the chronic misspelling ofthe C.S. ram Albemarle. A more fitting perspective on this book is provided when Shingleton assesses Wood's contributions to the Confederate cause. Significantly, the exploits for which Wood is most famous are astutely judged by the author to have had very little bearing on southern military fortunes. The forays of the Tallahassee, for instance, may have injured northern com­ merce and raised southern morale, but Shingleton asserts that they prob­ ably had no lasting effect on the war (he suggests that the vessel would have been more useful to the South as a blockade runner). The estimate of Wood's cutting-out raids is similar: good for morale but little else. In fact, the author concludes that Wood's recommendations for the strengthening of coastal defenses at Wilmington "constituted by far his most significant, if less colorful, contribution to the southern war effort." Shingleton's evaluation thus brings commendable detachment to the story of this Confederate sea ghost. It is ironic, though, that the author's judgement at the same time may undercut the value of his book. In other words, Professor Shingleton has completed a study of Wood as "the South's greatest coastal raider" only to determine that Wood's raids 120 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY are not so historically significant after all. Of course, the irony may not diminish the usefulness of this volume, but it certainly points to a per­ sistent problem of Confederate historiography. As biographers search for new subjects in this already overworked and oversized body of scholar­ ship, they must increasingly turn to minor military figures. Frequently they will find their efforts hampered by the dearth of manuscripts and other sources, which may ultimately shape the course of a narrative. In Shingleton's case the available writings dictate that the final fourth of this book should treat Wood's escape from Richmond after Lee's surren­ der. On the other hand, a paucity of reports on the naval battle at Drewry's Bluff requires a chapter on the subject to be padded with a general history of McClellan's Peninsula campaign. Thus, if John Taylor Wood suffers from an unevenness of treatment and a lack of historiographical significance, the result is a necessary consequence of the choice of subject. Certainly Professor Shingleton has handled well the materials at hand, especially Wood's private papers, and his product is an extremely interesting account of a dashing Confed­ erate. It is doubtful, though, whether the benefits of such biographies can outweigh their intrinsic drawbacks. Steve Davis Emory University

The Humble Petition of Denys Rolle, Esq: Setting Forth the Hardship, Inconveniencies, and Grievances, Which Have Attended Him in His At­ tempts to Make a Settlement in East Florida. By Denys Rolle. Facsimile reproduction edited by Claude C. Sturgill. (Gainesville, Fla.: The Uni­ versity Presses of Florida, 1978. Pp. xxx, 47, index. $6.50.) This slim volume forms part of the Bicentennial Floridiana Facsim­ ile Series, one of the more successful efforts to commemorate the second century of American independence. The State of Florida is to be congrat­ ulated for this commitment to the preservation of its history. This vol­ ume sheds light on two important issues: the friction which sometimes arose when English patronage failed to mesh with American politics; and secondly, the inflexibility of the plantation labor system. Denys Rolle, the author of this pamphlet, has long been a controver­ sial character in the history of East Florida. As a member of Parliament in the early 1760s, Rolle was in a favorable position to gain an extensive land warrant (20,000 acres) from the Privy Council. Unfortunately, his parliamentary background did not prepare him for the rigors of planting a settlement on the banks of the St. John's River. Rolle's trials and tribulations are set forth in detail in his pamphlet which asked the Privy Council to intervene in his dispute with Governor James Grant. Rolle's contest with Governor Grant centered on the issue of where Journal — Winter 1979 121 to locate Rolle's 20,000-acre grant. Rolle had established his settlement on the narrows ofthe St. John's River, "a Place of frequent Passage" (p. 84). However, when the land was surveyed, Rolle found it unacceptable. Rolle contended that the two surveys which included his village con­ tained only 540 and 800 acres of "good" land out of the whole of 20,000 acres (p. 72). Rolle wanted his 20,000 acres laid out in several tracts to get more rice land. Grant opposed this because he had little confidence in Rolle and felt that the province would be better served by giving the land to other settlers. Rolle countered that Governor Grant was simply playing favorites, arguing that the governor had no valid reasons for giving Francis Kinloch (Kinlaugh), a prominent South Carolina indigo planter, preferential treatment (pp. 44, 47, 64). Rolle's Petition provides at least one clue as to why Kinloch may have been received more favorably by Governor Grant. Rolle was an agricultural novice who planned at the outset to use indentured labor for his rice fields; Kinloch was an experienced planter whose slaveholdings were sufficiently large to allow him to establish a working plantation with ease. Rolle's labor schemes seemed destined to fail from the very beginning. When he arrived in Charleston in August 1764, he immedi­ ately lost five of the seventeen persons whose passage he had paid. They deserted him for a new employer (p. 5). Governor Grant in his letters to the Board of Trade made it clear that he had little faith in the group of white woodsmen and indentured servants that Rolle had gathered about him at his village. Henry Laurens, Rolle's principal correspondent in Charleston, agreed with Grant's assessment and was exasperated by the troubles he had in handling a group of Rolle's indentured servants in 1768. Like New Smyrna, a more extensive venture headed by Andrew Turnbull, Rolletown floundered because East Florida's labor shortages created an alternative for the indentured whites. Enslaved blacks, on the other hand, had no options and thus provided a more stable labor force for the plantation economy of the new province. Although the editor notes that Denys Rolle's papers probably did not survive the vicissitudes of time, more than a hundred bundles of James Grant's American papers have been preserved and are now in the care of the family heir, Sir Ewen Macpherson-Grant of Ballindalloch Castle, Scotland. These papers were called to the attention ofthe schol­ arly community in 1973, but the editor apparently had no opportunity to make use of them in preparing his introduction on Rolle. The Grant papers offer a rich source which will not only fill out the story of Denys Rolle, but that of East Florida as well. This facsimile is somewhat marred by the poor quality of reproduc­ tion. A number of words and phrases are blurred, even though the same passages come through very cleanly in a microfilm of the original pam­ phlet at the John Carter Brown Library. Additional assistance could have been provided to the user had the editor identified in the index 122 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY those prominent early settlers like Francis Kinloch, who appears in the pamphlet text as "Mr. Kinlaugh." But these flaws do not detract from the overall usefulness of the volume. David R. Chesnutt University of South Carolina

Richmond During the Revolution, 1775-83. By Harry M. Ward and Har­ old E. Greer, Jr. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, sponsored by the Richmond Independence Bicentennial Commission, 1978. Pp. xi, 205. $10.95.) Unlike many projects undertaken during the Bicentennial celebra­ tion, this study of Richmond during the Revolutionary period has consid­ erable merit. It is "popular history" in the best sense of the term: while based upon thorough research, it will prove informative and entertaining for general readers interested in the topic and it contains material of interest to specialists as well. Professors Ward and Greer are at their best describing the day-to­ day details of eighteenth-century life in the city, including the many problems of sanitation, traffic control (such as preventing horseracing on city streets), zoning needs, and the providing of other basic public serv­ ices. The act of incorporation passed by the General Assembly in 1782 significantly improved the capability of the city fathers to meet these problems. The authors also illustrate that early Richmond was a land of significant economic and social opportunity for its inhabitants, particu­ larly for its white inhabitants. There was no all-powerful entrenched aristocracy, good lots were available at reasonable prices for residential or business use, and labor—especially skilled labor—was much in de­ mand. The opportunity even extended, though to a much lesser degree, of course, to the city's black population. Of the 1031 people living in Richmond in 1782, 468 were black. While most were slaves, forty were free and a number of these "free Negroes" owned property in the city. More blacks proportionately worked at unskilled or servile positions than was the case with whites, but several seem to have held skilled or semi­ skilled jobs. Ward and Greer also describe the development of Richmond as a major commercial center, discussing in considerable detail the important role played by the city during the southern campaigns ofthe Revolution­ ary War. In so doing, the authors cover much that has long been familiar territory for scholars (such as the treatment of Tories and the various military manuevers and operations which ultimately culminated in Yorktown). The general readers for whom this book is primarily in- Journal — Winter 1979 123 tended, however, will probably find this material quite informative. Indeed, my only significant complaint involves the stylistic prob­ lems caused by the determination of authors and publisher to "popularize" this book. I was not surprised that the book had an exten­ sive bibliography but no footnotes, for publishers obviously believe (per­ haps justifiably so, I admit) that general readers consider footnotes to be a nuisance. Nor did I object to the local history trivia one expected to find interjected into such a book. But why must the reader endure an unbroken string of short, choppy paragraphs containing a maximum of three or four sentences? Does logical transition count for nothing, and must all books aimed at the general reading public look and read like a series of Madison Avenue advertisements? When judged on its own terms, for what it is rather than for what it might have been, this is a good book. Those of us who happen to believe that popular history should be good history, reflecting sound scholarship as well as a readable style, will applaud the appearance of this work. If it contains little that is going to be of major significance for historians, it is nevertheless a useful study of Richmond; even more broadly, it provides a fascinating glimpse of urban life during a very important period of our past. Raymond C. Bailey Northern Virginia Community College (Manassas Campus)

Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885. By Jonathan M. Wiener. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Pp. xiii, 247. $14.95.) In recent years, particularly since the appearance of Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy in 1966, historians have noted the similarities between Germany and the American South in their positions within the world market system of the nineteenth cen­ tury. According to this view, both societies manipulated servile labor to produce agricultural commodities for export. The large landowning classes of both societies repressed agricultural labor and developed anti- bourgeois attitudes despite their involvement in the capitalist world sys­ tem. Wiener uses Moore's term "Prussian Road" to describe the path toward modernization taken by postwar Alabama: a reactionary agricul­ tural system that repressed labor for the benefit of the planter class. Wiener, associate professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, contends that that Civil War and Reconstruction did not, as once thought, bring about the demise and destruction of the planter class. Rather, he maintains, the planter class in antebellum Alabama persisted 124 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY into the postwar era, successfully retaining its prewar dominance by overcoming challenges from freedmen, merchants, and industrialists. To continue the plantation system of agricultural production, plant­ ers used three tactics against freedmen who wanted to own their own farms rather than to work for others. Planters enlisted the aid of the Freedmen's Bureau staff, often recruited from native white Alabamians, to preserve the gang system of labor. They legislated repressive Black Codes to limit free competition in labor and eventually employed the terror of the Ku Klux Klan to keep freedmen on the plantations. While not overlooking other aspects of the Klan, Wiener emphasizes its func­ tion as an instrument of labor control for the planter class, particularly in Alabama's Black Belt where the extralegal organization reportedly enjoyed its greatest strength in the South. In the late 1860s planters acquiesced in the transition from agriculture based on gang labor to sharecropping because they could still supervise their laborers. Ultimately, planters' coercion of sharecroppers prevented the devel­ opment of a free labor market in the South. With this repression of argicultural laborers, the postwar South, in contrast to the North, pre­ served authoritarianism in social relationships and in politics. The planter class, that "agrarian reactionary elite," to use Wiener's phrase (p. 108), persisted in power with paternalistic, anticapitalistic values. Shortly after the Civil War, merchants who were able to offer exten­ sive credit to sharecroppers when planters were short on capital chal­ lenged planters for control of agricultural production. Though the Radi­ cal legislature passed crop lien laws that aided these merchants, the Redeemer government revised the laws to benefit planters in Black Belt areas. Merchants in postwar Alabama thus failed to displace planters as the dominant class. Wiener finds antimerchant themes in the planter press that reveal an ideological rift among whites that was previously ignored by historians. Just as they overcame challenges from merchants, planters thwarted the plans of industrialists. As in the antebellum era, postwar planters supported exploitation of the state's vast industrial resources only if conducted on a limited scale that served their interests. Planters manip­ ulated the widespread respect the New South had for the Old South myth which glorified southern plantation agriculture and ridiculed northern capitalists in order to check full development of the potential for steel production in the Birmingham area. Wiener's class interpretation of Reconstruction in Alabama contains many provocative, almost persuasive theses. References include United States manuscript census returns, Freedmen's Bureau papers, selected local newspapers, selected manuscript collections, and secondary works. The references marshalled by Wiener buttress his case, but they do not clarify certain ambiguities in his arguments. Much of his interpretation hinges on the persistence of the planter Journal — Winter 1979 125 elite, whom he has defined as the top 10 percent of real estate holders in selected counties for 1850, 1860, and 1870. Persistence was recorded on a family rather than individual basis; that is, if the planter himself, his wife or his son were present in the same county ten years after initially appearing in the manuscript population schedule. Wiener finds that the persistence of his postwar planter elite (43 percent) greatly resembled that of his antebellum elite (47 percent), thus concluding that the Civil War and Reconstruction periods did not drastically disrupt the elite. This conclusion rests on a definition of persistence that may be too inclusive. Although Wiener may have tried to determine exactly who was listed—a younger brother, cousin, or other relative ofthe planter instead of his son or wife—it was impossible given the nature of the mid- nineteenth-century manuscript census. Furthermore, while Wiener writes that he makes no attempt to connote a self-conscious class by his use of the word "elite" to denote planters in the top 10 percent of land­ owners, that is exactly what his readers can infer from his repeated discussion of class and class action. The "Prussian Road" analogy used so often to describe Alabama's reactionary agricultural system would be more effective had Wiener dis­ cussed the thesis thoroughly at the outset and offered a discussion of its application to American history much earlier than the crucial footnote on page 108. While the analogy has much to recommend it, it may in its focus on class discount too much the influence of other factors such as race in determining the social structure of the New South. These criticisms do not minimize the original contributions made by Wiener's study. The statistical analysis of the top tenth of real estate holders in the Black Belt provides strong, if not perfectly conclusive, proof of the limited nature of change in the pattern of large landholdings. The explanations of the planters' manipulation of freedmen's work con­ tracts and sponsorship of repressive laws and actions against agricultural labor are incisive. Wiener's class interpretation of social tensions in post­ war Alabama provides insights which must be considered by historians of the South, old and new. Harriet E. Amos University of Alabama in Birmingham 126 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY New Members

SPONSOR Dr. Stephen Goldfarb Lucy Ann Grant A. Schweiger Mrs. John S. Greenfield SUSTAINING John Grogan Richard Halpern I Stuart A. Cashin, Jr. Stewart L. Hamilton Mrs. Ruth Dimick Williams Mr. and Mrs. Overton Chenault Ha Mr. and Mrs. C. Lash Harrison ANNUAL Dr. and Mrs. David E. Hein Mr. and Mrs. Ernest J. Arnold Cyndie Heiskell Mr. and Mrs. Walter S. Akew, Askew, Jr. Joseph P. Helyar Mr. and Mrs. Bill E. Bates Mr. and Mrs. Dale Henson Mrs. Margaret Baylen Mrs. Claire Hubert Mrs. Boyd Beamer Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Isaf Mrs. Darla Bone Deborah James Jay Brooks Vann A. Jernigan Mrs. Martha Frances Brown Jane H. Johnson Robert Kenneth Brown, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. David B. Johnston Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Buck Barbara M. Karesh John A. Burrison Mr. and Mrs. Richard Kask Mr. and Mrs. Lawson P. Calhoun, Jr. Richard B. Kewer The Rev. and Mrs. James M. Carr Mr. and Mrs. Elliot F. Keyes Mr. and Mrs. James H. Carter Mr. and Mrs. Leftwich D. Kimbroug Tom Chapman Mrs. Nina Kimbrough Mrs. John W. Cherry, Jr. Antoinette F. Krancer Margaret M. Corsini Mike Lobdell Mr. and Mrs. Joseph E. Dabney Mr. and Mrs. J. Charles Lockwood Ms. Lee W. Davis J. L. Longino Cyrus Daniels Mrs. Leonore Marsh Joseph G. Dickey Mr. and Mrs. Rolland A. Maxwell Mr. and Mrs. Gene Dyson Mr. and Mrs. J. A. McCurdy Dr. and Mrs. Boyd Eaton Louise F. McNair Richard D. Estates Janet G. McPherson Elizabeth Faucett Mr. and Mrs. Tad A. Mollenkamp Dr. Paul Fekete Mr. and Mrs. Reed A. Morgan, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Harvey L. Fell Harry Moss Richard Orme Flinn III Mr. and Mrs. Frank H. North Dr. and Mrs. William Flinn Ann C. O'Brein Mrs. T. M. Forbes, Jr. Col. and Mrs. Stuart R. Oglesby III George P. Freeman Mary M. Pfrangle Mr. and Mrs. Carl I. Gable, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Thurston A. Prince Mr. and Mrs. Max Grant Gokee Mrs. William C. Pulliam Mr. and Mrs. Allen Questrom Journal — Winter 1979 127 Mr. and Mrs. James Rankin Mrs. Julianne H. Van Os Mr. and Mrs. John D. Ray Mr. and Mrs. F. Glenn Verrill William R. Reusswig Mr. and Mrs. Louis Voorhees Thomas W. Richey Mr. and Mrs. John F. Walter Mrs. Rosemary H. Richman Glenyce N. Waters Mr. and Mrs. William A. Rooker, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Earle B. Welsh Mrs. Joseph Satterthwaite Mrs. Thomas B. West Maria Sawyers Mr. and Mrs. Leonard W. Williams Mr. and Mrs. Jack S. Schroder Mr. and Mrs. Michael Wilmot J. L. Steenhuis Mrs. Warren Wimer Mrs. R. W. Sterrett Ms. Kim Youngblood Mr. and Mrs. Paul Steward Dr. and Mrs. Warren C. Strahle STUDENT Mr. and Mrs. Roger E. Sulhoff Joan E. Cashin Mrs. Frank Summers David G. Cavender Mr. and Mrs. J. W. Talley, Jr. Mrs. Elizabeth Michelson Mrs. J. W. Travis Robert C. Mitchell

IN MEMORIAM George W. Adair December 31, 1979 Hannah Pomela Bowden October 27, 1979 T. Clinton Huguley October 26, 1979 Mrs. Vann Jernigan December 24, 1979 Talley Kirkland September 15, 1979 Gilbert C. McLemore December 30, 1979 Carolyn Nicholson October 29, 1979 Sarah Shields Pfeiffer December 23, 1979 Clare Haverty Ridley October 27, 1979 Elmer E. Sanborn December 22, 1979 128 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY Atlanta Women from Myth to Modern Times

Academic Aduisory Board

Dr. Gloria Blackwell Dr. Beverly Macomsen Clark College Morris Brown College Dr. Barbara Clark Dr. Margaret Rowley Oglethorpe University Atlanta University Dr. Jean Friedman Beverly Sheftall University of Georgia Spelman College Dr. John Gignilliat Dr. Patricia Stringer Agnes Scott College Emory University Dr. Anna Grant Dr. Sandra W. Thornton Morehouse College Georgia Institute of Technology Sharon Greene Dr. Darlene Roth, ex officio Georgia State University Emory University Dr. Richard Long Atlanta University

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