Charles W. Chesnutt to Edith E. Robinson, 13 September 1932
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September 13, 1932
Miss Edith Robinson, Librarian,
Memorial Library,1
Wellington, Ohio.2
My dear Miss Robinson:
In looking over some letters received during my summer vacation, it occurs to me that I did not answer yours of June 24th, with reference to the books in the Martha Kinney Cooper Ohioana Library in the Governor's Mansion at Columbus.3 I am sorry that my books are not in the list, but the fact of the matter is that they are all out of print except the "Conjure Woman",4 and have reached the dignity of rare books. I have none of them available which I could donate to the library, nor can I suggest to you where you might find some.
Mrs. Chesnutt5 and my daughters join me in regards to you. We have not seen you for a number of years.
Yours very truly, CWC:MKCorrespondent: Edith E. Robinson (1876–1936) was the longest-serving librarian at Herrick Memorial Library (1904–1934), the public library in Wellington, Ohio. Her father and grandfather had been Black businessmen who owned barber shops and grocery stores in the town since before the Civil War. She seems to have known the Chesnutts personally.
1. Herrick Memorial Library is the public library in Wellington, Ohio, named for Myron T. Herrick (1854–1929), a Cleveland banker, Republican governor of Ohio (1904–1906) and ambassador to France (1912–1914). Herrick grew up in Wellington, financed the building that has housed the library since 1902, and left the library a large bequest at his death. [back]
2. Wellington, Ohio is a village in Lorain County, Ohio, nine miles from Oberlin, where Chesnutt lived as an infant (1858–1860). His father, Andrew Jackson Chesnutt (1833–1920), was arrested during the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue in 1858, when John Price, an enslaved man who had escaped to the area, was helped from Wellington to Canada by local abolitionists, in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act. The warrant for Chesnutt's father was nullified because his name was misspelled (see Helen Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952], 3; Frances Richardson Keller, An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chesnutt [Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1978], 55). Chesnutt used the village's name in several short stories for Midwestern towns and also for his fictional version of Wilmington, North Carolina. [back]
3. Martha Kinney Cooper (1874–1964) was the wife of Myers Y. Cooper (1873–1958), Republican governor of Ohio from 1929 to 1931. She founded the nonprofit Ohioana Library Association in 1929 and began assembling a collection of works by Ohio writers at the governor's mansion in Columbus, Ohio. By 1931, the Ohioana Library had over 600 donated volumes and was soliciting more via Ohio county committees and women's clubs. [back]
4. In early 1929, after Chesnutt had received the Spingarn Medal the previous year, Houghton Mifflin reissued Chesnutt's 1899 short story collection, The Conjure Woman. [back]
5. Susan Perry Chesnutt (1861–1940) was from a well-established Black family in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and worked as a teacher at Fayetteville's Howard School before marrying Chesnutt. They were married from 1878 until his death in 1932 and had four children: Ethel, Helen, Edwin, and Dorothy. Susan led an active life in Cleveland. [back]
