DEL.ICIO.US‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife’ gets new life from KSU
‘I think it will be heaven,’ says a university historian
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Last fall Marietta businessman Jodie Hill donated a restored, 56-acre farm named “In the Valley” to the University System of Georgia for the use of Kennesaw State University.
The farm in Bartow County once belonged to a preacher’s wife and writer named Corra Harris whose novel inspired the classic movie “I’d Climb the Highest Mountain,” starring Susan Hayward.
Rich Addicks/raddicks@ajc.com
Outside the original one-room cabin is a welcome sign announcing Harris’ celebrity as an author.
“In terms of historic preservation, [the farm] is a gold mine for Kennesaw State University,” said history professor Tom Scott, co-director of the university’s Center for Regional History and Culture.
Kennesaw State will use the farm for teaching environmental studies, archeology, literature and social history. University officials also plan to conduct tours and host civic clubs and conferences there.
Heather Howell, a public historian and project manager at Kennesaw State, and her husband are living in a caretaker’s cottage and managing the property.
“I think it will be heaven,” said Howell, looking over the peaceful green land and neat, well kept buildings.
Public-history students and faculty are cataloging and assessing the structures and objects. A few items are original— a hand-written letter on Harris’ desk, for example. Other furnishings authentic to Harris’ era were brought in by Hill, such as the bed in the room where “Gone With the Wind” author Margaret Mitchell stayed when she visited.
University officials plan to open the site to the public next year, Howell said.
About the time the school accepted the gift, the University Press of Florida published “Corra Harris and the Divided Mind of the New South,” a biography by Valdosta State University history professor Catherine Oglesby.
Harris wrote hundreds of essays and columns, more than a thousand book reviews for New York-based magazines and 19 books of her own. She served as a foreign correspondent during World War I for the Saturday Evening Post. She also endured the loss of her three children and the suicide of her husband, the Rev. Lundy Harris.
Her most popular work was the 1910 novel, “A Circuit Rider’s Wife.” The largely autobiographical work told of the trials and tribulations of the spouse of an itinerant Methodist preacher. Forty-one years after publication, the book was made into the popular film “I’d Climb the Highest Mountain.”
Harris, who died in 1935, was much more complex than Mary Thompson, the main character of the novel, Oglesby said.
“She’s constantly carrying on an almost inner dialogue with herself,” Oglesby said. “She really questioned everything in a healthy sort of way.”
Harris promoted traditional roles for women in many of her writings, but challenged them in her own life. At times she seemed to rail against women’s rights, but supported women’s suffrage to a degree, Oglesby said.
She accepted some racial stereotypes — and even wrote in defense of a lynching — but also admired W.E.B. DuBois and championed the idea of advancing the black race through education.
As for religion, according to Oglesby, Harris sometimes wrote of Jesus as the “Way, the Truth and the Light,” and at others as an “illusion” whose cross was a “symbol.”
In her autobiography, “My Book and Heart,” Harris acknowledged her ambiguity.
“I do not know what God could have been thinking about when he made me,—such a lie!” she wrote. “A being whose outside is an absolute contradiction to her inside. Whose every action is concealment of truth, who can never be veracious except when she is writing fiction.”
It was writing fiction that helped Harris emerge from a dark time in her life.
She was nursing her husband after what she called “an attempt at self-destruction” when she began writing “A Circuit Rider’s Wife,” first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, she said in an interview with writer Charles Dickey.
After Lundy Harris later ended his life while visiting friends in Pine Log, Ga., his widow bought a cabin near where he died.
“As one seeks sanctuary in times of distress, I came to this old Indian cabin which stands upon the footstool of a mountain in the backwoods of North Georgia,” she told interviewer Dickey, “and for the last 20 years I have slackened my gait and lived 50 years behind the times.”
Kennesaw State’s visitors will have the same sense of time standing still.
Hill was careful to ensure that the house, barn, spring house and remote office looked as if Harris just stepped away, from the dishes in the china cabinet to the 1932 Literary Digest on a table.
Hill, 89, whose mother was a fan of Harris’, said he bought the farm when he learned the land might be cleared for a new development.
“I bought it in order to save it,” he said.
He gave it away for the same reason.
Hill made his living selling insurance. He said he spent more than 12 years and $2 million on the land and 11 buildings, including a separate office where Harris worked, and a stone chapel over her grave.
He said he wanted to pass the property on to an institution with the will and resources to preserve it. Kennesaw State, about 45 minutes away, seemed a likely candidate.
“I was getting close to running out of funds and unable to spend the time,” he said. “What else was I going to do with it?”
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