When Christine Mitchell began frequenting used book stores and the main branch of the Fulton County Library in the late 1980s, her goal was fairly modest: To find some good resources for teaching her two young daughters more about African-American history.
Now it’s Mitchell who’s becoming an important resource. Over the past two decades, the 54-year-old College Park resident has used a combination of savvy networking skills, quietly intense passion for her subject and even a novel spin on the notion of buying on layaway to compile a small, but impressive collection of Civil War era newspapers.
Numbering slightly over 50, the newspapers are the lively centerpiece of a collection that also includes some 100 books and a handful of other documents such as a handwritten 1843 Louisiana estate inventory listing the names and monetary values of 45 slaves.
She made the leap to newspaper collecting early on, recognizing they provided an unvarnished first-read on history. And they open up new avenues of research with their pages of articles, illustrations and ads devoted to any number of topics.
“I started out looking for something I never found,” said Mitchell, who despite years of looking, hasn’t been able to get her hands on a copy of “The North Star,” famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ anti-slavery newspaper. “But the knowledge I’ve gained along the way is priceless.”
Now the petite grandmother wants to share the wealth. Her dream of turning her collection into an educational “trunk show” traveling to schools around the country is still in the formative stages. She’s looking for funding and ways to marry her materials to school curricula. Already, her avocation has brought her to the attention of the National Archives at Atlanta, which is interested in possibly incorporating some of Mitchell’s finds into a symposium next year marking the sesquicentennial of the start of the Civil War.
“Newspapers were the CNN, the Fox News of that time,” said Joel Walker, the Archives’ education specialist. “Christine adds almost a populist view to what we know about that time period.”
And no, he’s not talking about the plastic trash bags she used to tote part of her collection into a recent meeting at the sprawling Southeastern branch of the Archives, located in Morrow. All but one of Mitchell’s newspapers, a 1697 edition of England’s London Gazette, contains material related to the experiences of African-Americans before, during and after the Civil War.
“Some of this we might never have known about if it wasn’t written [in newspapers],” said Mitchell, who made the purchases with her own money and is particularly interested in newspapers that shed more light on the lives of slaves and African-American soldiers who fought in the war. “Some of it we might not think we want to know about, but in the end it’s a message of positiveness you get. Even through all the trials and tribulations, look at all the people who survived.”
Some of the material is as bluntly bone-chilling as the short story that ran on Page 1 of the May 26, 1820, edition of the [Columbia, S.C.] City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser offering $200 for the return of a pair of runaway slaves.
“Anthony [is] a short, square, thick fellow ... [who] affects a dress gaudy,” the article reads.
Some of it is oddly compelling in the same way that poring over sports statistics or census reports can be. Case in point: A county map of Georgia that dominated the front page of the Dec. 14, 1861, issue of Harper’s Week, published in New York City. The map lists each county’s slave population, ranging from 6 percent in mountainous Dade County to a whopping 86 percent in Glynn County along the coast.
“That’s because of all the rice plantations that were there,” surmised the National Archives at Atlanta’s Walker, leaning over the page spread out on a table.
Casting about for ideas on designing her educational program, Mitchell initially contacted the National Archives in Washington D.C. They referred her to the Atlanta branch, where early planning discussions had already begun about next year’s symposium — tentatively slated to take place around the 150th anniversary of the first engagement of the Civil War at Fort Sumter in April 1961.
“We’re hoping to include some authors, scholars and historians who are quite knowledgeable about the campaigns and battles that took place in the South,” said Mary Evelyn Tomlin, a public programs specialist. “And we’re hoping to do something with Matthew Brady’s photos and Christine’s papers.”
For Augusta native Mitchell even to be mentioned in the same breath as esteemed academicians and the father of photojournalism is impressive. She was only 7 when her last living grandparent died, handicapping her ability to know much about her history. She didn’t go to college and has spent most of her adult working life as an administrative assistant for various companies. The world was much less wired when she began hunting for newspapers in 1990, meaning she had to track leads via word-of-mouth or phone, rather than on eBay or by e-mail.
For awhile, Mitchell volunteered and later worked part time at both the Atlanta History Center and the Herndon House Museum. There, she learned the proper way to store historic documents flat in clear envelopes. She keeps her collection in a climate-controlled setting whose location she politely declines to reveal.
Over the years, she says, she’s forgotten what she paid for many of the newspapers. She recalls one costing as little as $30, others so much more that she had to arrange to put them on layaway with the seller, often another collector.
“I’d pinch away a little bit from the bill-paying money and the grocery money,” said Mitchell, who lives with her two daughters, now 25 and 26, and her 4-year-old grandson. “There were times I didn’t go to the mall and buy a dress because I had some document on layaway.”
What made it worthwhile then is the same thing that makes her want to share her collection with schoolchildren now.
“Some people leave their kids land or money,” Mitchell said. “I figured, why not leave mine a sense of the history I didn’t have when I was growing up?”
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