Helen Keller and Ivy Green

I try not to return to places more than once, simply because there are so many places to go. One place has defied this rule, however, and it is Ivy Green, birthplace and home of Helen Keller. I have been many times, and I keep going - with friends and with family. I take them because it is a story that everyone should know. It is a story at which I marvel, and every time I go I'm humbled and amazed and revitalized with possibility.

Helen wrote, "I was born June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, a little town in northern Alabama."

Let's go back to Tuscumbia now....

In The Story of My Life, Helen says, "I lived up to the time of my illness that deprived me of my sight and hearing, in a tiny house consisting of a large square room and a small one, in which the servant slept. It is a custom in the South to build a small house near the homestead as an annex to be used on occasion. Such a house my father built after the Civil War, and when he married my mother they went to live in it. It was completely covered with vines, climbing roses, and honeysuckles."

The small early Keller home - Annie Sullivan later took Helen to this house to engender trust.

"The Keller homestead, where the family lived, was a few steps from our little rose bower. It was called 'Ivy Green' because the house and surrounding trees and fences were covered with beautiful English ivy. Its old-fashioned garden was the paradise of my childhood."

Ivy Green - "When I was about five years old we moved from the little vine-covered house..."

The English ivy still covers the fences

Magnolia in the gardens and yard

 Inside Ivy Green...

The entrance hall

Helen's clothing

Annie and Helen's bedroom

The dining room made famous by "The Miracle Worker."

Perhaps the most exciting thing to come across is outside - and it is there for everyone to easily access and touch - after all, touch was the sense that brought Helen out of her darkness and into enlightenment.

The water pump

Annie Sullivan wrote, "I made Helen hold her mug under the spout while I pumped. As the cold water gushed forth, filling the mug, I spelled 'w-a-t-e-r' in Helen's free hand. The word coming so close upon the sensation of cold water rushing over her hand seemed to startle her. She dropped the mug and stood as one transfixed. A new light came into her face. She spelled 'water' several times. Then she dropped on the ground and and asked for its name and pointed to the pump and the trellis, and suddenly turning round she asked for my name. I spelled 'Teacher.'"

http://www.helenkellerbirthplace.org/helenkellerhome/helen_keller_birthplace2_home.htm

Frances Hodgson Burnett ~ "Waiting for the Party"

One would rightfully envision the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Little Princess, and The Secret Garden in England, would they not, amidst a pastoral scene of walled flora and fauna? Frances Hodgson Burnett was, indeed, born in England, but her family moved to the United States when Frances was fifteen.  In Waiting for the Party, a biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett, this fateful passage in her life is described: "She was fifteen and a half and her character was formed. The characteristics she showed then, so she herself maintained, were to stay with her for the rest of her life. She was curious, romantic, buoyant, compassionate, generous, restless and not very wise...The Hodgson family reached Tennessee in June."

 Not only did they move to the United States.  ~ they lived in two small towns in East Tennessee named New Market and Dandridge.  It was 1865, and the Civil War was just over. Although they saw destruction everywhere and had to live in a tiny cabin (which Frances compared to Fenimore Cooper), Frances was enraptured by the forests.

Historic marker dedicated to Frances in New Market, TN

"All you could see were the hills and the forests and the vast clear blue sky. A field sloped upwards beyond the log-cabin. There were green aisles of tall, broad-leaved Indian corn, and beyond the cornfield, the forest. 'There is a wide, wide distance - a distance which is more than a matter of mere space - between a great, murky manufacturing town in England, and the mountains and forests in Tennessee - forests which seemed endlessly deep, mountains covered with their depths of greenness, their pines and laurels, swaying and blooming, vines of wild grape and scarlet trumpet-flowers swaying and blooming among them, tangles with the branches of sumach and sassafras.' Frances stopped pretending in the old way. 'There was no need to pretend...' She began to deal with emotions. In Islingon Squre she had imagined - in the forests she began to feel."

She made money by teaching and gathering berries for the family to sell. She also gave music lessons and started a seminary for young people. She married Dr. Swan Burnett, and somewhere along the line, it seems she befriended the Williams in Greeneville. The Williamses lived in the Dickson-Williams Mansion, once called the "Showplace of East Tennessee." It was here that the famed Confederate General John Hunt Morgan met his untimely end.

The Dickson-Williams Mansion

There is now a room in the mansion dedicated to Frances Hodgson Burnett, and in it is the desk on which she wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy. Her own son had lamented the fact that there were no books for young boys, so she corrected the omission.

Frances Hodgson Burnett Desk

Vintage edition of Little Lord Fauntleroy

How thankful I am that she wrote her timeless classics for girls as well! And what a wonderful surprise to find yet another classical connection in my own backyard.

 

Secret Garden print by Charles Robinson

Christy ~ The Quest for Cutter Gap

I can thank my Aunt Latane and cousin Marie for introducing me to "Christy." I was in my teens, and it was life-altering to read the intensely powerful journey of another young woman, inhabiting the same mountains. Little did I know how close the story really was to home.  As chance would have it, I began attending a local church with a high school sweet-heart, and was amazed to learn that Catherine Marshall, author of Christy, had been born while her parents were pastoring the very same church. Why, that would make her parents...that would make her mother the inspiration for....

 

Christy. 

"I retreated into the room to the dresser and began taking the hairpins out of my hair, staring at my reflection. Eyes too big for the rest of my face, a little too serious, even a bit frightened, stared back at me. A face too thin, the hollows beneath the cheekbones shadowed by the lamplight...As the last hairpin was withdrawn, my long hair came tumbling down."

Her real name was Leonora Whitaker. And she had taught at a mission just down the road from my home. El Pano is the town of Del Rio, TN. I made a sojourn there, to all the places so marvelously described in the novel, and I will let them speak for themselves. The inspiration for Catherine had come when she returned to the gap with her mother. 

"It was at that moment, standing there in the O'Teale cabin and thinking of Alice Henderson that I got my first clear glimpse of the book I had always wanted to write about the mountains. As if reading my thoughts, mother said shyly, 'The story aches to be told Catherine.' And suddenly, I understood the story should be told through my mother's eyes."

The Click House - the O'Teale Cabin

"The train began to slow down and the engineer blew a long warning whistle. Conductor MacDonald announced that we were coming into El Pano and began lighting all the railroad lanterns...Old Buncombe's wheels ground to a stop. Already my eyes were searching the dusk. There wasn't much to see ~ just a tiny station building and four or five houses....'Could you tell me ~ is there anywhere in El Pano where I could spend the night?'

Inspiration for Mrs. Tatum's boarding house.

'Well, lets, see. Maybe Miz Tatum's...' A Victorian frame house loomed out of the darkness. The peak of the roof trimmed with wooden cutouts was silhouetted against the dusky sky."

"United States Mail!"

"Mr. Pentland, I need help. I've come to teach school in Cutter Gap. I thought someone would meet me at the station yesterday, but nobody did. So I'm trying to find a way to get out to the cove. Mrs. Tatum said you could help me since you carry mail out there."

The inspirations for Miss Alice, Fairlight, Jeb, and children. Fairlight's given name was Flora Corn.

Miss Alice  ~ "...was wearing a straight blue woolen skirt and an immaculate white linen shirtwaist. Mr. Pentland had said, 'braided hair wound round and round her head like a crown.' He was right. There was something queenlike about her. But by far Miss Henderson's most unusual feature was her eyes ~ fathomless deep gray in which there were traces of fatigue."

Fairlight ~ "I could scarcely take my eyes off her, for she was beautiful in a plain, artless way. Still a young woman, in her early thirties, but with all these children...she was wearing only a calico dress and was barefoot...Her features were delicate: nose turned up at the end every so slightly, which gave her a piquant look. Delicately shaped lips. Hair parted in the middle, drawn back into a bun...but...what was it about her eyes? Wistful, that was it...The oldest girl looked like her mother except that she was a bit round shouldered..."

Jeb ~ "His beard was red blonde. His eyes were blue, set deep in their sockets...there was something debonair about him."

Children ~ "The children's bright eyes were still watching me. The littlest girl, the one named Lulu, had the high rounded forehead and the fat-cheeked cherub look of a bisque doll. All of them were tow-headed."

The Mission House

"The [mission] house was a white frame three-story building with a screened porch on each side. Directly behind it loomed a mountain...its base within a few feet of the back door. The house itself had been built on the top of the rising ground at the rear of a very large yard fenced across the front. This together with the church-schoolhouse, a lattice covered spring-house, a double outhouse, and Miss Henderson's cabin comprised the mission buildings..."

All that remains of the Mission House today.

John Ambrose Wood, the inspiration for David Grantland.

 "I saw a tall young man with black hair, warm brown eyes, a wide smile...[and I] heard a deep voice...Mr. Grantland had black hair, carefully groomed, fine white even teeth, friendly brown eyes set wide apart...[and] the booming voice never stopped." 

 

The "church that David built."

Ebenezer - the church has been moved to a different location.

The haunting strains of the song used in the book.

Fairlight's cabin