Miss Walker and the Grahams

This week I became the proud owner of No. 45 of 100 copies of “Memoirs of the Graham Family” by Annie Kendrick Walker. It seems that after Walker wrote “Something of the Remarkable History of Hayslope” for the Birmingham Age-Herald, on the occasion of Theo and Louisa Rogan’s 50th wedding anniversary in 1904, someone in Louisa’s Graham family asked if she would compose a history of that illustrious family, given that half of the Hayslope story goes into detail about the Grahams anyway.

And so she did. The little chapbook includes a portion of that Age-Herald article, plus more details about the Grahams themselves. It was published by Tobias A. Wright in New York, who seems to have published a number of family histories and more, including a 1918 translation of Rainer Maria Rilke poems. The Graham volume was probably published about 1908 and then handed out to members of family. As I waited for mine to arrive, I wondered if there was any way I could determine who No. 45 belonged to … I needn’t have worried. Right on the inside cover, gold-embossed on black, was the name H.G. Morison, and it didn’t take long to learn that “H.G.” meant Hugh Graham.

Hugh Graham Morison was the great-grandson of Hughe and Catherine Nenney Graham, the progenitors of the family. He was the son of Henry and Annis Kyle Morison, who was the daughter of Hughe and Catherine’s oldest child, Mary Ann, who married a fella named Absalom Kyle. Hughe never knew him, but Catherine Nenney – whose picture adorns the cover of the book – may well have. The boy was four, nearly five when his great-grandmother died.

H.G. Morison himself wasn’t an old man when he died in 1925, a judge by then. I imagine the book passed to his only son, H.G. Jr, who lived into the 1970s. How my copy of the book got to a used bookstore in Kingsport I don’t know, but I do know something of where it went, thanks to a couple of notes I found within the pages.

The first was written to Kate Graham Murphy, apparently giving her the book, hoping she will “find it interesting” and “discover the relationships.” Hughe Graham – the note-writer says he’s his great-great grandfather – “constantly wrote to his kin in Mecklenberg County, NC.” I found Kate Graham Murphy, originally from Durham, North Carolina, and also learned that she was not related to the Claiborne County Grahams, which she also concluded, according to a second note I found inside the book and written in her hand. She details her Graham family and says she can’t find a Hugh Graham anywhere. “Sorry I can’t find a way to make myself kin to those illustrious and good-looking folks,” she writes.

The first note is signed “Graham,” and I can’t help but wonder if that’s H.G. Morison Jr, if he had met Kate Graham Murphy somewhere and wondered if they were related, then gave her his father’s copy of the book. How it ended up back in Kingsport – and with both the note he wrote to her and her reply – I have no idea, but there it is.

And there was one more inclusion in the pages of the book – a torn-out clipping from the Knoxville News-Sentinel dated November 20, 1977. It’s about the appointment of Debra Hubbard as educational coordinator for the historic Frank R. Rogers home, “Speedwell,” which was to be opened as a museum in December of that year. The article explains that Speedwell was built in 1830 in Tazewell and that Frank Rogers had it moved to Knoxville in the 1950s.

What it doesn’t say is that Speedwell was originally Castle Rock, the home of Hughe and Catherine Nenney Graham. It was dismantled and moved brick-by-brick, plank-by-plank, and rebuilt in Knoxville. The project took three years to complete, and is now again a private home.

About Miss Walker

Naturally, while awaiting my copy of Miss Walker’s book, I finally became curious about her. Turns out she was a rather well-known Alabama writer, from an old Southern family in Eufaula. And by “old” I mean she came from a wealthy, slave-owning family that lost much of its property after the Civil War, but still came through with some money intact, as her father shifted from plantation owner to merchant.

Miss Walker herself rarely let an inkling of her own views roam freely, although it’s clear that she remained, until her death in 1966 at the age of 85, a genteel, if complicated, southern lady.

The Walker house in Eufaula is no longer standing, and neither is the famous “Walker Oak,” a 200-year-old tree in the yard that was given deed to itself in 1935, the effort led, of course, by Anne Kendrick Walker herself. The tree was replaced after a tornado toppled it in 1961, and, according to the Chamber of Commerce, “several times” since then, but all its successors have owned themselves on Cotton Avenue.

At the time she wrote her Hayslope history for the paper, she was the Age-Herald’s society editor, occasionally penning articles for papers in New York and elsewhere. A fine example of that is a cheeky interview with all-but-forgotten-now author Mary Johnston, once one of America’s best known writers with THREE silent films made from her books, for the New York Times Saturday Review.

She and her mother lived for a time in North Carolina, then moved back to Alabama, before finally moving to New York. But the lure of Alabama never left, and she often came back to Birmingham or Eufaula for the winter.

Apparently, Miss Walker, who appears never to have married, wasn’t the only Alabama writer in New York, because she was often the president of the Alabama Society of writers while there. Back in Alabama itself, she headed state and local chapters of the National League of American Pen Women. The state chapter called her “the Dean of Alabama Women Writers.”

She retired back to Alabama permanently, if by retired you mean quit writing for someone else and became a prolific writer of Alabama histories, embarking on her second career as a historian. She penned a history of her native Barbour County and another of Russell County, and one I’m awaiting a copy of myself – 1944’s “Tuskegee and the Black Belt: A Portrait of a Race.” By this time, she’d been calling herself Anne Kendrick Walker, instead of Annie, which I guess happens as one gets older.

A review of the latter book calls it “carefully restrained in its manner” but presenting “the liberal Southern point of view, which advocates elevation of the Negro’s status but with a clear separation from white society.”

“And certainly the book offers, factually and without comment, much information that could, if they read it, shed light into the minds of Southerners who refuse to see that the South must, for the good of both races, regardless of personal prejudices, grant the Negro his full constitutional rights of equality at law and equality of opportunity,” the reviewer writes.

The book talks about what was then the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), George Washington Carver, and Booker T. Washington, and I can’t wait to see just how this “southern liberal” Alabama writer carves a fine line through this “Black Belt.”

When I first read Miss Walker’s article about the Rogans’ wedding anniversary, I wasn’t sure what to think. She had a few facts wrong – Hughe Graham didn’t buy Hayslope from its founder Col Thomas Roddye because it’s founder, Col James Roddye, was dead by then, but Hughe did get the house from his son, Thomas – and it seemed … frivolous. But then, she was the society editor of the Age Herald, so I suppose that was to be expected. The Johnston interview was actually quite good, though, and other snippets of her writing have shown that I was somewhat hasty in forming an opinion. And she did have a long and illustrious career and was clearly beloved in her native state.

Genealogically, it seems the Walker line ended with her and her brother Robert, who also never married and worked for a different Birmingham newspaper – the News.