'We Are Finally Coming to Claim Our Writers'

The Wren's Nest, the Atlanta home of Joel Chandler Harris, was built in 1870. Preserved as a museum in 1913, the house is now run by the great-great-great-grandson of the author of the Uncle Remus stories. Efforts are ongoing across Georgia to save sites linked to famous writers. (By Erik S. Lesser)

"It had been a rental house, and hay and farm tools were stored in it at one time," said Winston Skinner, a local newspaperman and chairman of the museum committee. "It was cut into three pieces and moved and put back together like we believe it originally was."

Caldwell -- author of "Tobacco Road" and "God's Little Acre," two racy bestsellers of the early 1930s that depicted Georgia sharecroppers in a harshly realistic light -- did not win over his home town with his sometimes graphic work. Skinner said some in Moreland still view him as "a communist and a pornographer," and one past mayor vigorously fought the plan to restore the house.

Caldwell was born in the home, now known as the "Little Manse," in 1903. He lived there for only a few years, until his father moved the family to Wrens, a town in east Georgia near Augusta where many of the author's best-known works are based.

As for the Little Manse, it's sparsely decorated and undergoing repairs. In some rooms, plastic covers the windows. A few original items from the home and Caldwell's father's life survive, including a small, folding organ that his father carried with him on ministry visits.

Atlanta: Joel Chandler Harris and Margaret Mitchell

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Getting from Moreland to the Wren's Nest, Harris's home in Atlanta's West End, is a fast 45-mile interstate ride north.

Built in 1870, the Queen Anne-style house is the oldest in Atlanta open to the public. Preserved as a museum in 1913, the rooms contain much of Harris's original furniture, including the bedroom where he died in 1908. Last month, the Wren's Nest was awarded a much-needed challenge grant of $130,000 from the Watson-Brown Foundation for improvements, said Lain Shakespeare, the home's executive director.

"It's been over a decade since the Wren's Nest has funded a budget for restoration and preservation," said Shakespeare, Harris's great-great-great-grandson. "Heck, 18 months ago there wasn't a budget for much of anything."

About six miles north, irony abounds at the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum, which sits amid a smattering of glittering skyscrapers. What Mitchell referred to as "The Dump" was declared an Atlanta city landmark in 1989, burned by an arsonist in 1995, and then restored with a $5 million grant. An arsonist again struck 40 days before the house was to be opened for the Olympic Games in 1996. The rebuilt structure opened to the public in 1997.

Mitchell's apartment, renovated to look as it did when she lived there from 1925 to 1932, contains replicas of her furniture and belongings. She was recuperating there from a series of injuries, including a fall from a horse, when she began writing "Gone With the Wind." It won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize and was turned into the Best Picture Oscar winner of 1939.

The accompanying museum includes an impressive collection of her letters, and the "Gone With the Wind" Movie Museum across the street is a comprehensive look at the making of the film.

In 1949, Mitchell's life ended only three blocks away, at the intersection of Peachtree and 13th streets, where a taxi hit her. She died less than a week later and is buried in Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery, southeast of downtown.

Joe Samuel Starnes is a novelist and journalist who grew up in Georgia.