Charles W. Chesnutt to Mary and William Donahey, 8 January 1931
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January 8, 1931
Mr. and Mrs. William Donahey,
2331 Cleveland Avenue,
Chicago, Ill.
Dear People:
In spite of the hard times ‸& prevailing financial distress, which has pretty nearly wiped me out, taxes still come due with unfailing regularity. As usual, I have procured your individual tax bill on your Chester Cliffs property, which I enclose herewith.1
The taxes on the company's property for the first half of 1930, which are now due, after deducting taxes on Miss Delahunte's cottage,2 amount to $29.27. Add to this the state franchise tax, $25.00, makes a total of $54.27, which, divided into eleven shares, the stock outstanding, gives $4.94 a share, which multiplied by five, the number of your shares, gives $24.70; for which please send me your check. The due date had been extended to January 20th.
I have not yet filed the certificate of dissolution of the corporation, which would reduce the taxes $25.00, but I have been waiting for Miss Delahunte to pay for the land which we allotted to her. She has promised to come in and attend to it, but hasn't as yet done so, and I will call her up in a day or two.
Family as well as usual. Helen3 seems to have gotten over all her physical difficulties and is in blooming health. She published in a recent number of the Classical Journal an article on a Latin play which she worked up at Central High School4 during the Virgil celebration, which is quite a distinction in scholastic circles.5 Mrs. Chesnutt6 is still more or less lame from her accident a couple of summers ago. Dorothy7 and little Johnnie8 are well. Dorothy's husband9 took his M.D. degree last summer, and passed the Ohio State medical examination last fall, so that he is now a full fledged M.D. At present he is an interne in a Detroit hospital, but will get out next fall fully equipped for the battle of life.
Our friend Counts10 is now doing time in the penitentiary. All his appeals, etc., having availed him nothing. I expect he got what he deserved, though I am sorry for his wife.11
We all join in regards and best wishes for a happy and prosperous 1931. 1930 has been a very sad and distressful year for many people including
Yours sincerely,Correspondent: 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. Mary Augusta Dickerson Donahey (1876–1962) was a White journalist and author of children's books. She was originally from New Jersey, grew up in New York City and worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer from 1898 to 1905. She married the cartoonist William Donahey (1883–1970) in 1905 and moved with him to Chicago, where she wrote children's and young adult books, cookbooks and newspaper columns. The couple befriended the Chesnutts in the early 1900s, when they were part of the Tresart Club and the Chester Cliffs Club.
1. 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]
2. Mary Ellen Delahunte (1870–1951) was a White woman who lived in Cleveland most of her life. In 1921, she purchased a plot of land from A. Frank Counts (1881–1946) and his wife Eula (1869–1942), members of the Chester Cliffs Club. The Counts had not consulted the other members of the Club and gave Delahunte the impression that she was not responsible for property taxes or repairs relating to the property. This led to conflicts within the Club regarding Delahunte's unpaid tax bills. [back]
3. 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]
4. Central High School was established in Cleveland in 1846 as the first public high school in the city. From 1878 to 1940 it was located at 2201 Willson Ave. (today's E. 55th St. at Central Avenue). Chesnutt's children attended the school, as did his son-in-law Edward C. Williams (1871–1929). His daughter Helen (1880–1969) taught Latin there as Cleveland's first Black secondary-school teacher starting in 1904; the poet Langston Hughes (1902–1967) was one of her Latin students. [back]
5. See Helen Chesnutt's "Ecce Vergilius!" The Classical Journal 26, no. 4 (January 1931): 273–278. [back]
6. 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]
7. Dorothy Katherine Chesnutt Slade (1890–1954) was the youngest child of Charles and Susan Chesnutt. After attending the women's college at Western Reserve University from 1909 to 1913 and working as a probation officer for two years, she began teaching junior high school French and English at Willson Junior High School in Cleveland. She married John G. Slade (1890–1976) on March 29, 1924; they had one child, John C. Slade (1925–2011), known as Johnnie. [back]
8. Chesnutt's grandson "Johnnie," John Chesnutt Slade (1925–2011), spent much time with his grandparents as a small child, since he and his mother, Dorothy (1890–1954), lived with them until the fall of 1931, when her husband John G. Slade (1890–1976) completed his medical degree at Howard University. Johnnie and his mother also spent the summers with his grandparents in Idlewild, Michigan. [back]
9. John Galamiel Slade (1890–1976) was born in Scioto, Ohio, and married Dorothy Chesnutt (1890–1954) in 1924. Their son Johnnie (John Chesnutt Slade, 1925–2011) was born the next year. Slade received a doctorate in veterinary medicine at Ohio State in 1919 and continued his studies there, but then completed a medical degree at Howard University in 1930 and began to practice in Cleveland in the fall of 1931. [back]
10. 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]
11. Eulalie (Eula) Gaskill Miller Counts (1869–1942) was a White woman who had family roots in Stark County, Ohio, where her father was a grain dealer. She attended Ohio Wesleyan University. Nothing is known about her first marriage, but a son from that marriage, Joseph Gaskill Miller, died young (1890–1908). Eula married A. Frank Counts (1881–1946) in 1913 and was active in a number of Women's clubs in Cleveland; the couple owned a cabin in the Chester Cliffs Club, near the Chesnutt family. Around 1930, the couple relocated to rural Virginia, possibly as a result of the scandal surrounding Frank's embezzlement and subsequent prison sentence; they owned a farm near Lightfoot, Virginia. [back]
