Charles W. Chesnutt to William Donahey, 12 May 1922
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May 12, 1922.
Mr. William Donahey,
5808 Winthrop Avenue,
Chicago, Ill.
My dear Bill:
In writing to you last night1 I omitted to state that under the law of Ohio it requires the ownership of at least one-third of the stock of a corporation to dissolve it by petition.2
If you should sell to Frank3 before a division were made, Helen4 and I would not own one-third of the stock and Frank Counts could run things his own way. I don't think he wants to divide up the land,5 and that his object in wanting to buy you out is to put himself in a position to prevent it. I called him up at 2:30 this afternoon and he said he would let me know at 3:30 whether he could go out there or not. Just now, at 4:15, I called his office, the girl said he was there, I said I would like to speak to him, she said, "Just a minute." I heard her tell somebody who it was, then she called back to me and said that she had thought Mr. Counts was in but had found that she was mistaken and that she would tell him to call me when he came in. I do not expect him to call me, and I don't think my self-respect will permit me to call him any more. If you will let me know what you write him, if you have n't written already, or what you wrote him if you have, I shall be able to tell just where we stand.
Cordially yours, CWC/FLCorrespondent: William (Bill) Donahey (1883–1970) was a White writer and cartoonist from Westchester, Ohio. After graduating from the Cleveland School of Art in 1903, he briefly worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he met and married Mary Dickerson Donahey (1876–1962) in 1905 and became friends with the Chesnutts. The couple joined the Chester Cliffs Club and built a cottage on the land. After 1905, the couple moved to Chicago, where he worked for the Chicago Tribune and produced a widely syndicated comic strip, the "Teenie Weenies," which ran intermittently from 1914 until his death and became the basis of an advertising campaign for a canned-goods company in the 1920s as well as for several books he co-wrote with his wife.
1. The referenced first letter, conjectured to be dated May 11, 1922, on the basis of this remark, only exists in the form of a draft, mostly written in shorthand, on the verso of Donahey's letter of May 1, 1922. [back]
2. The suggestion to dissolve the Chester Cliffs Club as a corporation was first made by Mary Dickerson Donahey prior to the fall 1921 stockholder meeting (see her letter of September 2, 1921), after Frank and Eula Counts had sold one of their cottages to Ellen Delahunte, who was not part of the Company. Chesnutt used his knowledge of corporate and real estate law to argue against the dissolution, although the Chesnutts and Donaheys discussed it as an option throughout 1922; the corporation was never formally dissolved. [back]
3. Albert Franklin (Frank) Counts (1881–1946), a White Cleveland lawyer with a 1906 law degree from Western Reserve University's law school, was a member and initially the secretary and treasurer of the Chester Cliffs Club when it was founded. In 1913, he married Eulalie (Eula) Gaskill Miller Counts (1869–1942), who was also a shareholder in the Club. In 1930 Counts was given an eighteen-month prison sentence for embezzlement in a fraudulent divorce case. Paroled in December of 1931, he joined his wife in rural Virginia, where they lived on a farm that was auctioned off after his death. [back]
4. Helen Maria Chesnutt (1880–1969) was Chesnutt's second child. She earned degrees from Smith College and Columbia University, taught Latin (including to Langston Hughes) at Cleveland's Central High School for more than four decades starting in 1904, co-authored a Latin textbook, The Road to Latin, in 1932, and served on the executive committee of the American Philological Association in 1920. She became her father's literary executor and first biographer. [back]
5. The Chester Cliffs Club or Company was a small stockholding corporation founded in September 1903 by Chesnutt and ten friends who were "stockholders," in order to purchase eleven acres of land in Chester Township near Chesterland, Ohio, and Scotland, Ohio, twenty miles from Cleveland. Summer cottages were built by three of the parties in order to spend their summers away from the city, and in 1916 the Chesnutts purchased one of these. Stockholder meetings were called every fall, even as eventually only three families seem to have remained: the Chesnutts, the Donaheys (who were living in Chicago after 1905), and the Counts. In 1921, Frank Counts (1881–1946), a Cleveland lawyer who was the longtime secretary and treasurer of the Club and his wife Eulalie (Eula) (1869–1942) sold a lot with a cottage to Mary Ellen Delahunte (1870–1951) without consulting the other members, causing conflicts about property tax and upkeep for years. Shortly afterwards, Chesnutt, as the club president, took on the responsibility of reminding members of tax payments and calling the annual meeting. Some of the property was transferred to individual owners in 1923, but the corporation was never legally dissolved. [back]
