O'Connor's Hill House Restoration

A few months ago after a visit to Flannery O'Connor's farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Ga., I wrote a post on the proposed restoration of the Hill House. This structure is on the farm behind the main home where O'Connor and her mother lived, and housed Jack and Louise Hill, caretakers of the farm, and a boarder. The home has been in sad disrepair, and in February Andalusia received grant funds to begin restoring it. It's the largest grant ever to be awarded to the farm. The project has begun (read about it here). I can't wait to go back for a visit and see the Hill House once it's back to its original self.

Speaking of O'Connor, my book club has chosen one of her short story collections, A Good Man is Hard to Find, for our June meeting. I'll be happily rereading these stories once my turn comes up for the book at my library.

Where One Writer Began

Eudora Welty once wrote, "Location is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course." Last week I spent four days in Mississippi with my parents and one of the highlights for me was seeing Welty's home in Jackson. I mentioned recently that I loved One Writer's Beginnings when I read it in graduate school. Even though it's been several years since reading her memoir, much of it came back to me upon visiting her hometown.

Here is the home she lived in from age 16 until she dies in 2001 at age 92. Much like Carl Sandburg's home in Flat Rock, NC, Welty's home has been left just as she had it in the 1980s when she was doing lots of writing and traveling. It's sunny with large, comfortable, functional rooms and ordinary, every day furniture. It looks like the kind of house anyone could live in. What I enjoyed most about the house were the books she had everywhere and her typewriter upstairs in her bedroom. I also loved that she spread her manuscripts out on the dining room table so she could view the piece as a whole, and often physically cut and pasted parts of pages together to rearrange the order of her stories.

As we were wrapping up with our tour guide, we had the pleasure of meeting the former director of the home and Welty's niece, who favors her aunt for sure.

This was the first time I have visited Jackson, and I particularly liked two downtown landmarks that are associated with Welty. First, the Lamar Life building (below with the clock tower) was her father's insurance company. After reading One Writer's Beginnings, I know Welty associated clocks and time with her father, so it was wonderful to see that his building boasted a clock. 

As a child, Welty often roller skated to the library from her childhood home near downtown Jackson. In her path was the Capitol Building, and she usually skated right through the lobby.

Just before leaving town, we drove to her childhood home (it looks like it's a private residence today). I tried to snap a good picture but this is all I could get. The house is just down the street from an elementary school that was letting out. There were parents' cars and buses everywhere, and a police officer told us to move on. 

All of this helped put Welty in perspective for me. I think it's time to do some rereading!

Montgomery, Alabama

Our last stop on the way back to Atlanta was in Montgomery, Alabama, where we had a few things on our agenda. The first was another stop on the Southern Literary Trail at the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum at 919 Felder Avenue. Zelda was a Montgomery native and met Scott in 1918 at a country club dance while he was stationed there with the U.S. Army. We passed the site of this country club (now a Sonic) on our way to lunch afterwards.

The home remains the only of the Fitzgeralds' many residences to still be in existence. The couple and their daughter, Scottie, rented the home from September 1931 to February 1932. Zelda wrote her first draft of her only novel, Save Me the Waltz, while they lived here. Scott started writing Tender is the Night.



Today the home is subdivided into several apartments, and the first one on the right downstairs is the museum. About three rooms are on display and have furniture both of the period and that the Fitzgeralds owned. The museum's director, Michael McCreedy, showed us around and provided lots of helpful information. As it turns out, the Southern Literary Trail was born out of a meeting held in one of the museum's rooms. Ten of Zelda's paintings are on display at the museum, and more will be exhibited this fall at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts to coincide with a Eudora Welty photography exhibit. There's a good chance I'll need to go back to Montgomery for all of that!

One interesting fact that McCreedy shared is that Zelda's family, the Sayres, was the owner of the home that became the First White House of the Confederacy, and the family sold the home to the CSA to house Jefferson Davis and his family in 1861 before they relocated to Richmond, Virginia. So that meant that after we met up with an old friend for lunch, we had to check it out for ourselves.

The home is furnished beautifully with period pieces, including some from the Sayre family. It contains many items from the Davis family as well, and there is also information about the home's preservation.

All in all, pretty interesting stuff. The trip was a huge success. Now I guess it's time to start planning the next one!

Monroeville: Literary Capital of Alabama and Home of To Kill a Mockingbird

It feels like I have been waiting forever to get the chance to visit Monroeville, Alabama, while the annual production of To Kill a Mockingbird is going on. Finally, finally I got my chance. Monroeville was our next stop after Columbus, Georgia, last week on the literary road trip. Monroeville has a population of about 6800 people, and it was declared in 1997 "The Literary Capital of Alabama." This was a good year for me to visit, as we arrived in town the day after author Harper Lee's 84th birthday, it was the 50th anniversary of the novel's publication, and the 20th anniversary of the play production. The town had rolled out the red carpet, so to speak, in celebration in and around the courthouse in the center of town.

Monument for Atticus Finch, "Lawyer, Hero" given by the Alabama State Bar Association.

Birdhouses in honor of the book's 50th year.

The set for the first act of the play on the lawn of the courthouse. The second act was inside the historic courtroom.

A mural of Scout, Jem and Dill and the tree in front of the Radley home. This is painted on the side of the jewelry store on the square across the street from the courthouse.

On our way back to the hotel, we passed the cite where Harper Lee's childhood home once stood, and it is now Mel's Dairy Dream.

Next door is the cite where the Faulk home stood. Truman Capote visited his relatives here many times as a child, and throughout his adult life. The house burned years ago, but some of the foundation remains, and a marker has been placed there to mark the spot. I wonder why there's no marker for Harper Lee at Mel's?

Here's where we ate dinner on the way to the play, Radley's Fountain Grille.

When the evening came, we attended the anniversary production of To Kill a Mockingbird, performed by actors who were local volunteers. You'd never know it though. They were fine actors, and made the book absolutely come to life in a magical way. Bob Ewell, the most despicable character in the novel was spot-on by a man who, for his day job, is a district attorney! All the other actors had a variety of other professions and lives outside the three weeks the perform To Kill a Mockingbird 20 times. Some of the cast members are in the two photos below.

The three children are standing together here.

And, Atticus Finch (in the cardigan) and Heck Tate (in the vest and hat).

House Museum: Carson McCullers

This week, my mom and I traveled to Columbus, Georgia, and Monroeville and Montgomery, Alabama, to see three Southern Literary Trail sites. I mentioned here recently that I read Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and her childhood home in Columbus was our first stop.

We had arranged for a tour ahead of time, and we were met at on the front porch by the director of The Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Cathy Fussell. The home is a beautiful example of a Craftsman-style house, and was occupied by McCullers' family, the Smiths, from 1925 until 1944. Today the home is owned and managed by Columbus State University, but remains accessible to the community as events, readings, meetings, and other gatherings are regularly held here. The University has an active creative writing program, and its students have the benefit of having The Carson McCullers Center available to them.

McCullers described this home and her hometown in numerous places in her stories, and according to Fussell, McCullers felt crowded in Columbus, but comfortable in her family's home. McCullers' bedroom was on the front of the house and in it she wrote The Member of the Wedding sitting at a desk next to this dresser.

Fussell told us an interesting tidbit that tied in well with the rest of our trip. McCuller's sister, Rita Smith, was an editor in New York and the first person to publish Truman Capote.

McCullers wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in Fayetteville, NC, while she lived there with her Army husband. Currently, Fayetteville's The Museum of the Cape Fear has a McCullers exhibit on display through May 30. So, for those of you reading from North Carolina, be sure to check this out sometime this month. I, myself, am going to see if I can swing a visit.

Fussell was a wonderful, knowledgeable tour guide. You can read more about The Carson McCullers Center on her blog.

After we left the McCullers home, we headed for downtown Columbus to get lunch and see Broadway, the main drag that McCullers described in her work.

We realized on the way that Columbus should get an award for repurposing old buildings. This house is now a Burger King (note the playground to the left), and this barbeque restaurant where we ate lunch was once a bus station.