Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh
Page 71
32. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 41-42.
33. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 41.
34. Eugene Mitchell was born in 1866 and Maybelle Stephens Mitchell was born in 1872; neither had any first-hand knowledge of the war but both remembered the chaotic period that followed it and talked about it often.
35. UGa. MM to Julia Collier Harris, 28 April 1936.
36. UGa. MM to Julia Collier Harris, 28 April 1936.
37. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 15.
38. Farr, 14.
39. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 22.
40. AHC. Stephens Mitchell, “Margaret Mitchell and Her People.” 13.
41. Letter provided by Jane Dieckmann, 3 May 1993.
42. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 23.
43. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 27.
44. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 27.
45. UGa. Maybelle to MM, n.d.
46. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 25.
47. UGa. MM to Henry Steele Commager, 10 July 1936.
48. UGa. MM to Henry Steele Commager, 10 July 1936.
49. Darden Pyron, Southern Daughter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 450.
50. EU. Harvey Smith’s note attached to MM’s letter. 21 April 1933.
51. UGa. SMP. Note. Also Farr, 19.
52. UGa. MM to Joseph Henry Jackson, 1 June 1936.
53. Evidence of Maybelle’s frequent absences are found in Eugene Mitchell’s letters to her, but her illnesses are not identified.
54. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 65.
55. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 32. Mary Johnston’s novels were The Long Roll and Cease Firing; the latter was the book that Peggy said was the “best documented novel ever written” about the war, and she consulted it for certain facts about the campaign from the Tennessee line to Atlanta. MM to Paul Jordon Smith, 27 May 1936.
56. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 31.
57. UGa. Several of these copybooks are in the Hargrett Library, and a couple of others are in the AHC.
58. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 71.
59. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 66.
60. UGa. SMP.
61. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 66.
62. Farr, 34.
63. UGa. SMP.
64. Farr, 40.
65. UGa. In his papers, Eugene Mitchell makes no mention of such injustices.
66. UGa. SM’s “History of the Mitchell Family.”
67. UGa. Eugene Mitchell to Maybelle Mitchell, July 1901.
68. EU. MM to Harvey Smith, 15 March 1933.
69. AHC. Stephens Mitchell, “Margaret Mitchell and Her People.” 14.
70. Farr, 22.
71. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 66. Greek Revival architecture spread all over Georgia around this period, the early 1900s, and it reached its peak just before the boll weevil’s coming ruined the cotton industry and ended this architectural style as completely as the Civil War had ended the other.
72. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 66-67.
73. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 71.
74. Interview with JK. Washington Seminary was a wealthy citizen’s converted residence located near Peachtree Station in an area of elegant homes; it was not a building designed from the beginning to be a school.
75. Interview with JK.
76. Farr, 38.
77. Jane Bonner Peacock, Dynamo Going to Waste (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1985), 13-19.
78. Peacock, 18.
79. UGa. MFP File. “Twenty-fifth Anniversary of Gone With the Wind,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 16 May 1954.
80. Farr, 46.
81. UGa. MMMP. Wanting to use the simile of wheat and buckwheat in her novel, Mitchell, while working on Gone With the Wind, wrote to Dr. Stuckley, an agriculture specialist. She asked him if the story her relatives told her were true. In his reply he explained that the seed of buckwheat ripens while the main stem of the plant is still green; consequently, buckwheat plants, blown over, will come nearer rising again because the stem growth has not ceased. The habit of all growing plants is to stretch up toward the sun. Straw of wheat ripens or becomes dry with the ripening of the grain. A dry wheat straw, once blown down, will not be able to rise because growth processes have ceased. Hence, her “buckwheat people” simile applied to those who were strong, flexible, resilient, and resourceful.
82. John’s maternal grandfather’s people were Kennans (sometimes spelled Kennon). Richard Kennan, a wealthy gentleman, was the first Kennan to come to America from England sometime prior to 1670. He settled about five miles below Petersburg, on the James River in Virginia. He and three of his friends, Francis Eppe, Joseph Royall, and George Archar, became joint grantees of a patent for 2,827 acres of land in Henrico County, Virginia, and the Virginia Land Registry Records show that between this period and 1761 there are grants of land to various members of the Kennan family to the extent of more than fifty thousand acres. Richard Kennan was a merchant and an agent for a firm in Glasgow, Scotland, doing business in America; in this connection, he made many trips to Scotland and England. He imported glazed brick and built the first brick house in his locality. He married Elizabeth Warsham and they had four children.
83. Thomas Berry was born in July 1733 at Berry Plains in King George County, Virginia. In 1757, he married Frances Anne Kendall (born 1737 or 1738, died 1818). They had ten children whom they raised at Berry Plains. Later they and their children moved to Kentucky. In his old age, Captain Thomas Berry returned to Virginia, where he died 18 Dec. 1818. (The names of his children are found in the Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society, 22, no. 65, pp. 196-98.) In addition to genealogical information Jim Davis provided, I obtained other information from UK.
84. Lewis Collins and Richard H. Collins, History of Kentucky (Frankfort, KY: Historical Society, 1966), 2: 545-93.
85. UK. Also Jim Davis’s history of the Marsh family.
86. Mason County Museum. Maysville was established as a town in 1787 by the legislature of Virginia. Until Kentucky became a state in 1792, all of the region known as Kentucky County was owned by Virginia.
87. Mason County Museum. Maysville, KY.
88. UK. Maysville Daily Bulletin, Sunday, 30 Dec. 1904.
89. Sara Jane Kennan was born in 1832 and died in 1915. Robert Toup was born in 1825 and died in 1902.
90. Marsh family interview.
91. MMD. JRM to his mother, 18 Jan. 1949.
92. UK. Newsclipping from Maysville Daily Bulletin, 30 Dec. 1904, provided information about John’s father and funeral service.
93. Katharine Kennan Marsh Bowden was born 21 Aug. 1890, and died 2 Oct. 1981. Henry Neal Marsh was born 6 May 1893, and died 4 Dec. 1969. Ben Gordon Marsh was born 20 Oct. 1897, and died 2 May 1954. Frances Maitland Marsh Zane was born 23 Jan. 1901 and died 3 March 1986.
94. Interview with FM.
95. AHC. FMZ’s interview for Anne Edwards’s Road to Tara.
96. AHC. FMZ’s interview for Anne Edwards’s Road to Tara. Interview with FM. Katharine Marsh, John’s oldest sister, sketched a picture of their mother doing the puppet shows for the children.
97. MMD. JRM to Miss Anna Frank, 13 Dec. 1950. JRM to Edna Daniel, 22 Dec. 1950.
98. MMD. JRM to Miss Anna Frank, 13 Dec. 1950. JRM to Edna Daniel, 22 Dec. 1950. Information about the school and factory came from the curator at the Mason County Museum in Maysville, Kentucky.
99. Interview with MMD.
100. AHC. FMZ’s interview for Anne Edwards’s Road to Tara.
101. Interview with FM.
102. Interview with FM.
103. Interview with FM.
Chapter 3
Reasonable Ambitions
1. UK. History of the University of Kentucky.
2. MMD. MMD’s letter to the author, 31 May 1990. Letter quotes from a tape recording her father, Henry Marsh, made about his and John’s college days.
3. Interview with MMD. Henry Marsh was born in Maysville, Kentucky, 6 May 1893. After earning a bachelor of science degree from the University of Kentucky, he started with the Hercules Powder Company as a chemist at the Experiment Station, then at Kenvil, NJ, in
1917. In 1930 he was named assistant to the director of operations, Explosives Department, and by 1939 he had become manager of the smokeless powder division. In August 1946, he assumed the managership of both the smokeless powder and the sporting powder divisions, which were then merged. He served as a lieutenant colonel in the Ordnance Reserves in World War II and as a consultant to the National Defense Council. He has six United States patents and one British patent in the propellant field to his credit. He was divorced from his first wife, Mary Frances Moore, by whom he had one child, Mary Otwell Marsh Davis. His second wife was Mary Genevieve Hunter, by whom he had three children, Eleanor, Jane, and Henry, Jr.
4. MMD. JRM’s college letters to his mother frequently mentioned Kitty during this period.
5. John took a course named “Pre-Shakespearean and Shakespearean Drama, an intensive study of the native English element in Shakespeare,” and followed it by a study of Shakespeare’s works.
6. Telephone interview with Don Edwards, writer for the Lexington Herald Leader.
7. E. I. “Buddy” Thompson, Madame Belle Brezing (Lexington, KY: Buggy Whip Press, 1983), 87.
8. Interview with FM.
9. Interview with FM.
10. MMD. From a Lexington Leader newsclipping that John’s mother had saved.
11. MMD. From Mr. H. Giovannoli, editor and manager of the Lexington Leader, who wrote John on 28 May 1918. The editor’s letter is among Mary Marsh’s papers.
12. MMD. JRM to his mother, 9 March 1919. According to Thomas Weesner (letter to the author, 28 May 1993), Mrs. Fannie Prim was the widow of S. C. Prim, and her boarding house was on West Peachtree Street between Kimball Street (now Ponce de Leon Avenue) and Third Street. Mr. Weesner also informs me that the 1924 city directory lists John R. Marsh, copyreader for the Journal, as living at 45 Peachtree Place, between Cypress Street and Columbia Avenue, which was the home of Mrs. Beulah Gault, widow of J. T. Gault. I am also indebted to Mr. Weesner for the information on John’s Langdon Court apartment in chapter 5.
13. Interview with FM.
14. MMD. Questionnaire for Georgia Power Company, Advertising Department.
15. MMD. JRM to his mother, 21 May 1920.
16. MMD. JRM to his mother, 21 May 1920.
17. MMD. JRM to HM, 22 May 1920.
18. MMD. JRM to HM, 22 May 1920.
19. Interview with FM.
20. AHC. William S. Howland, “Peggy Mitchell, Newspaperman,” AHB 9, no. 34. 50.
21. AHC. Howland, AHB 53.
22. MMD. JRM to HM, 22 May 1920.
23. UGa. MMMP. Newsclippings.
24. Finis Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta (New York: Morrow, 1965), 50.
25. EU. Harvey Smith’s note attached to MM’s letter. March or April 1933.
26. Accounts of her relationship with her family are found in Mitchell’s early letters and are also found in Stephens Mitchell’s memoirs. In Finis Farr’s authorized biography there is mention of the disputes between her and her grandmother and between her and her father.
27. Jane Bonner Peacock, Dynamo Going to Waste (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1985), 31-32. MM to Allen Edee, 13 Sept. 1919.
28. UGa. SM’s Memoir.
29. Interview with MMD.
30. Jane Bonner Peacock, Dynamo Going to Waste (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1985), 29. MM to Allen Edee, 21 July 1919.
31. Peacock, 97. MM to Allen Edee, n.d., 12 o’clock Wednesday p.m. [summer 1920].
32. Farr, 55.
33. Peacock, 83. MM to Allen Edee, 26 March 1920.
34. Peacock, 64. MM to Allen Edee, 4 March 1920.
35. Peacock, 75. MM to Allen Edee, 26 March 1920.
36. Peacock, 114. MM to Allen Edee, circa May 1921.
37. Peacock, 35-36.
38. Peacock, 104. MM to Allen Edee, Sunday afternoon, 31 July 1920.
39. Peacock, 69. MM to Allen Edee, 13 March 1920.
40. Interview with FM and Deon Rutledge.
41. Peacock, 49-51. MM to Allen Edee, 18 Nov. 1919.
42. Farr, 53.
43. UGa. MM to Mrs. Alix Gress Sellers, 4 June 1947.
44. After Peggy left Northampton in 1919, the year Edee graduated and took a job in New York, she wrote him until December 1921, when he returned to the Midwest to manage his father’s clothing store. Once he left New York, he broke off his correspondence with her. He married in 1922 and, apparently, never made any effort to write or speak to her again. These letters have been gathered and edited by Jane B. Peacock in A Dynamo Going to Waste.
45. Peacock, 75. MM to Allen Edee, 26 March 1920.
46. Peacock, 101. MM to Allen Edee, 31 July 1920.
47. Peacock, 74. MM to Allen Edee, 13 March 1920.
48. Peacock, 74. MM to Allen Edee, 13 March 1920.
49. Peacock, 125. MM to Allen Edee, 21 Aug. 1921.
50. Peacock, 132.
51. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday morning [late spring 1926].
52. Peacock, 88. MM to Courtenay Ross, n.d. (attached to MM’s letter to Allen Edee dated 26 March 1920).
53. Peacock, 55. MM to Allen Edee, 1 Dec. 1919.
54. Peacock, 54-55. MM to Allen Edee, 1 Dec. 1919.
55. Peacock, 76. MM to Allen Edee, 26 March 1920.
56. Peacock, 77. MM to Allen Edee, 26 March 1920.
57. Peacock, 55. MM to Allen Edee, 1 Dec. 1919.
58. Peacock, 87. MM to Courtenay Ross, n.d. (attached to MM’s letter to Allen Edee dated 26 March 1920).
59. Peacock, 86. MM to Courtenay Ross, n.d. (attached to MM’s letter to Allen Edee dated 26 March 1920).
60. Peacock, 86. MM to Courtenay Ross, n.d. (attached to MM’s letter to Allen Edee dated 26 March 1920).
61. Charles E. Wells, “The Hysterical Personality and the Feminine Character: A Study of Scarlett O’Hara,” in “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film. Ed. Richard Harwell. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), 118.
62. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d. [1926 or 1927].
63. Peacock, 117. MM to Allen Edee, Monday, 1 or 2 Aug. 1921.
64. AHS. Road to Tara file.
65. Farr, 56.
66. AHC. Stephens Mitchell, “Margaret Mitchell and Her People,” AHB 9, no. 34. 22-23.
67. Peacock, 100. MM to Allen Edee, 31 July 1920.
68. Peacock, 128-29. MM to Allen Edee, 21 Dec. 1921.
69. Peacock, 128-29. MM to Allen Edee, 21 Dec. 1921.
70. Peacock, 125. MM to Allen Edee, 21 Aug. 1921.
71. Peacock, 104. MM to Allen Edee, 1 Aug. 1920.
Chapter 4
A Bizarre Courtship
1. FMZ. JRM to FMZ, 20 Jan. 1922.
2. GWTW, 818.
3. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday a.m. [Feb. or March 1925].
4. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday morning [late spring 1926].
5. UGa. Anne Equen, “Margaret Mitchell’s Story for Annual Once Rejected,” Atlanta Constitution, 11 Dec. 1939. Interview with JK.
6. UGa. SM’s Memoir. Box 114. Folder Heading 14:9.
7. UGa. MFP, “Was Margaret Mitchell Writing Another Book?” Atlanta Journal Magazine, 18 Dec. 1949.
8. Interview with FM.
9. UGa. SM’s Memoir. 71-72.
10. The Youth’s Companion was for many years the mainstay of a New Hampshire part-time farmer, teacher, and poet—Robert Frost. Saint Nicholas published poems by one of Peggy’s contemporaries, Edna St. Vincent Millay, in 1908 and 1909. It is not known whether Peggy submitted any of her material to the popular magazine, which published some of its readers’ contributions monthly. During the 1890s through the 1920s, this magazine inspired more than one young American who later became a famous writer.
11. UGa. MM to Donald Adams, 9 July 1936.
12. Finis Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta (New York: Morrow, 1965), 77.
13. Interview with FM.
14. UGa. SM’s Memoir.
15. FMZ. JRM to FMZ, 20 Jan. 1922.
16. Jane Bonner Peacock, A Dynamo Going to Waste (Atlanta: Peachtree Publ
ishers, 1985), 74. MM to Allen Edee, 13 March 1920. Also, JRM to his mother, 15 Oct. 1924.
17. Interview with FM.
18. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday morning [late spring 1926].
19. FMZ. JRM to FMZ, 20 Jan. 1922.
20. American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, 1985.
21. GWTW, 175-76.
22. UGa. MM to Julia Collier Harris, 8 July 1936.
23. Farr, 53.
24. Farr, 54.
25. Farr, 54. Also, in UGa. SMP; in Atlanta Journal feature article in UGa.; and in Peacock, 112.
26. Farr, 54.
27. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d. [late 1925 or early 1926].
28. John and Henry Marsh took care of their mother all of their adult lives, and they also took care of Frances until she married. Information about Upshaw from UGa.; from Farr, 56; and from interviews with FM and MS.
29. GWTW, 940.
30. UGa. SMP. Also Farr, 56.
31. Interview with FM.
32. Farr, 56.
33. FMZ’s Papers.
34. Peacock, 54. MM to Allen Edee, 1 Dec. 1919.
35. Interview with FM.
36. GWTW, 1016.
37. FMZ. JRM to FMZ, 27 March 1922.
38. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d. [spring 1926].
39. AHS. FMZ’s interview with Anne Edwards.
40. FMZ’s Papers.
41. MMD. JRM to his family, 9 May 1924.
42. MMD. JRM to his mother, 30 July 1922.
43. Farr, 56.
44. Peacock, 117. MM to Allen Edee, 1 or 2 Aug. 1921.
45. Augusta Dearborn’s interview with Anne Edwards, AHC.
46. Interview with FM.
47. JK to the author, n.d., Palm Sunday Eve [1989].
48. Darden Pyron in Southern Daughter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) claims that Peggy patterned Rhett after her mother Maybelle.
49. GWTW, 1022.
50. GWTW, 843.
51. GWTW, 844.
52. GWTW, 846.
53. GWTW, 1016.
54. GWTW, 928-29.
55. FMZ. JRM to FMZ, 11 Aug. 1922.
56. MMD. JRM to his mother, 6 Sept. 1922.
57. Farr, 56.
58. MMD. JRM to his mother, 6 Sept. 1922.
59. Interview with FM.
60. MMD. JRM to his mother, 6 Sept. 1922.
61. Interview with FM.
62. Interview with FM. MM said this to FM in 1927; however, she told others too. She never even tried to keep her “mistake” a secret; it was well known among their circle at the Georgia Power Company, according to Mary Singleton.