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"Home of Mrs. George Madden Martin"
(Author of Emmy Lou)
This clapboard Victorian gingerbread may
once have been the home or summer home of George Madden Martin, the pen
name of early 20th century authoress Mrs. Attwood R. Martin.
Relative to other Pewee Valley landmarks, the location is correct and it
is the only candidate of the appropriate age in the area; however, the
Oldham County Historical Society is conducting a title search to
determine its ownership at the time the
Lloydsboro Valley map was drawn.
While the house did not play a role in
the “Little Colonel” stories as far as we know, there was a real-life
relationship between George Madden Martin and Annie Fellows Johnston. Both
were members of the Authors Club formed in the 1890s, according to a
footnote to a
“Time” magazine article about the Little Colonel movie published in
the March 11, 1935 issue:
“In the
1880s three young married women in Louisville formed an informal
literary club, began three novels which they read to each other at
meetings. The young women were Alice Hegan Rice, “George Madden Martin”
(Mrs. Atwood R. Martin), and Annie Fellows Johnston.
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Alice Hegan Rice
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Annie Fellows Johnston wrote about her experiences with
the Authors Club in her autobiography, “The Land of the Little Colonel,”
published in 1929:
That summer our little Author's
Club came into being. Evelyn Snead Barnett proposed it. She was spending
the summer at
the Inn in Pewee
Valley. George Madden Martin and Eva Madden were living in the valley
then, and the four of us used to meet with Miss Allison to discuss
methods of writing. It was always a little club, never more than seven
or eight, but later on it numbered the author of "Mrs. Wiggs of
the Cabbage Patch" and the "Lady of the Decoration" among its members;
also Abby McGuire Roach, Mary F. Leonard, Margaret Vandercook, Margaret
Steele Anderson, and Ellen Semple. Each of them has one book to her
credit and some of them many more. Later, Eleanor Mercein Kelly joined
us.
After that summer we met in
Louisville once a week for over twenty years. At the meetings the
members took turns reading a manuscript, which was duly criticized. In
all that time I never knew of one of the members getting her feelings
hurt, for we took the criticisms gladly and profited by them.
At one time this was given to
the Club to work out: "A well bred young lady in a barber shop at
midnight. How did she get there and how did she get out?" Each one told
a different tale. The Black Cat magazine took them all and devoted one
entire number to the collection of tales.
We always had some sort of
frolic every year. The tie that bound us was a very strong one and our
friendship was deeply rooted. The memory of it is one of my most
cherished possessions.
Of the three young women, Annie Fellows Johnston was first to find fame
and fortune through her pen, when “The
Little Colonel ” was published in 1895. Both George Madden Martin and
Alice Hegan Rice published their best-selling children’s books in 1902:
Madden with “Emmy Lou: Her Book and Heart” and Rice with “Mrs.
Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch .”
According to “History of Old Louisville:
The People ” by Margaret M. Bridwell, “In the early 1900's the
members of the Authors Club published more than seventy volumes.”
Undoubtedly, Authors
Club members discussed both the joys and tribulations of commercial
success. Answering fan mail and requests for autographs could certainly be
counted among the tribulations. In this excerpt from
Chapter IV, “The
Shadow Club ” from “The Little
Colonel at Boarding School,” Annie Fellows Johnston describes the
tremendous time and expense involved in answering all those letters:
…the principal found
twenty-three letters in the mail-bag one morning, all addressed to a
well-known writer of juvenile stories, whose books were the most popular
in the school. An investigation proved that because one girl had
received his autograph, twenty- three had followed her example in
requesting it, and not one of them had enclosed a stamp; nor had it
occurred to them that an author's time is too valuable to spend in
answering questions, merely to satisfy the idle curiosity of his
readers.
"One stamp is of little value," said the
principal, "but multiply it by the hundreds he would have to use in a
year in answering the letters of thoughtless strangers, who have no
claim on him in any way." Twenty-three girls filed out into the hall
after the principal's little talk that followed, and slipped their
letters from the mail-bag. Ten of them threw theirs into the
waste-basket. The others, who had asked no questions and were more
desirous of obtaining their favourite author's autograph, opened theirs
to enclose an envelope, stamped and addressed; but few more letters of
the kind went out from Lloydsboro Seminary after that.
Was Johnston talking
about herself or, by referring to the author in question as male, was she
making a veiled reference to her friend, who wrote under the pen name
George Madden Martin?
form letter young readers would often receive
from Annie Fellows Johnston.
(enlargement)
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Biographical Information
about George Madden Martin
(May 3, 1866-November 30, 1946)
George Madden Martin was born in Louisville in 1866
to Frank and Anne Louise (McKenzie) Madden. Both she and her sister, Eva,
attended Louisville public schools, although Mrs. Martin was forced to
finish her education at home due to health problems.
She published her first book, “The Angel of the
Tenement,” in 1897, but it met with little commercial success. In later
years, she seldom listed it among her published works.
Her first and greatest literary achievement was “Emmy
Lou: Her Book and Her Heart,” published in 1902. The book actually
began as series of stories that appeared serially in “McClure’s Magazine”
from 1900 to 1901:
(From her obituary in the “Courier-Journal,”
December 1, 1946):
“…Begun as a short story, ‘Emmy Lou” came to the
attention of Lincoln Steffens, then editor of McClure’s magazine. He
visited Mrs. Martin at her home, then in Anchorage, and arranged for
publication of all her future work. In the next 20 years, she wrote more
than half a dozen novels on the activities of Emmy Lou…
A “Literary History of Kentucky” by William S. Ward,
published by the University of Tennessee Press in 1988, describes the
book’s commercial success and the reasons why it appealed to such a large
audience:
(page 124)
“…The stories had been widely read in serial form,
of course, but as a volume they were an even greater success and went
into frequent reprinting and eventually sold well above two hundred
thousand copies. The reason for this popularity was in part Martin’s
skill as an author, but it was also due to the fresh and different
subject matter. She dealt with the problems of a charming,
born-to-be-loved little girl who is slow to learn in school but is
always faithful and always tries. By implication, Mrs. Martin is saying
that current methods of teaching are not designed for such children,
with the result that their road is difficult and life frustrating. Since
counterparts to Emmy Lou were to be found in all schools and many homes,
the book appealed to a wide audience and remained a steady seller for
forty years or more, was never out of print, and is credited with
motivating change in teaching methods…”
Some of Mrs. Martin’s other books included: “Abbie
Ann,” published in 1907; “Children in the Mist,” published in 1920; and
“Made in America,” published in 1935. For Kentucky’s
sesquicentennial, she penned the story of Jane Todd Crawford – the patient
with the ovarian tumor who brought Danville’s Dr. Ephraim McDowell fame as
a pioneer in abdominal surgery. It was published in “The Kentucky Medical
Journal.” None of her subsequent works, however, enjoyed the popular
acclaim of “Emmy Lou.”
Mrs. Martin was not only author. She was also a
champion of social reform, according to an Op-Ed piece titled “The Mother
of ‘Emmy Lou’ A Distinguished Citizen” that appeared in the December 2,
1946 edition of the “Courier-Journal”:
Mrs. Martin contributed much more to her community
than the reflected glory of her success as a novelist and contributor to
the leading national magazines. She took her obligations as a citizen
seriously…She was in politics – a member of the Democratic State
Committee in the League of Nations campaign of 1920. She later was a
Kentucky leader of the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition
Reform…
…But perhaps she will better be remembered for her
intelligent and long-continued work in the promotion of better racial
relations. She was a charter member of the Commission on Interracial
Co-operation and served as head of the Association of Southern Women for
the Prevention of Lynching. The latter organization attached the pretext
that lynching survived for ‘the protection of Southern womanhood.’ It
showed that, where lynching was concerned, all sorts of base reasons
were hiding behind the skirts of Southern womanhood.
Mrs. Martin also had the unique privilege of becoming
the first woman ever to be made a
Kentucky Colonel.
George Madden Martin’s Anchorage
home. Known as “Anchorage Place” or the “Old Goslee Place,” it was
originally built by riverboat captain James W. Goslee and his wife,
Catherine Ramsey White Goslee in 1868 for $12,476. The Martins owned the
property from 1906 until 1913, according to “The Village of Anchorage”
by Samuel W. Thomas, published by the Anchorage Civic Club, 2004. Today,
it is considered one of Anchorage's most historic residences. Photo from
the Kentucky Digital
Library's Herald-Post photographs collection, digital ID
klgsc:klgsculrsc021:94.18.0259
After her husband, Attwood R. Martin, died in July
1944, she moved from her Anchorage home to live with friends at 1304
Eastern Parkway. She died there on November 30, 1946, leaving $8,000 in
cash to her sister Eva, her sole survivor. She is buried in
Cave Hill
Cemetery, Section O, Lot 275, grave 9.
Just as Annie Fellows Johnston did not live long
enough to see “The Little Colonel” reach the silver screen, neither did
Mrs. Martin live to see Emmy Lou, when it appeared in 1960 as an episode
of the popular television program,
Shirley Temple's Storybook , with Bernadette Withers starring as the
title character.
Photos of George Madden Martin from
The Kentucky Digital Library
Herald-Post collection
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page by Donna Russell
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Lee's Ranch,
Camelback Mountain &
Hole-in-Rock (Arizona),
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The Gate of the Giant Scissors (France)
Letters from Annie
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