Charles W. Chesnutt to Plain Dealer Publishing Company, 20 June 1931
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June 20, 1931
Plain Dealer Publishing Company,
City.
Gentlemen:
Confirming my telephone conversation of this morning, please change the delivery of the daily and Sunday Plain Dealer, addressed to Charles W. Chesnutt, 9719 Lamont Avenue,1 beginning with Tuesday's paper, and send same by mail to Charles W. Chesnutt, Idlewild, Lake County, Michigan.2 Last year I gave the same order but for some reason I did not get the paper for about a week. Please see to it this time.
I have already paid my subscription to some future date, and if there is anything additional for postage, please charge me with it, and I will pay it with the next subscription.
Thanking you in advance,
Yours very truly, CWC:MKCorrespondent: The Cleveland Plain Dealer was founded in 1842 as a weekly newspaper in Cleveland. It became a daily paper in 1845 and added a Sunday paper in 1885. By 1917, it had absorbed several other Cleveland papers; its main rival for over a century was the Cleveland Press (1878–1982). It typically leaned Democrat, but Chesnutt (a life-long Republican) was a loyal subscriber for many years. He is mentioned occasionally as a noted author and citizen, but the coverage of Cleveland's Black community was generally limited.
1. After relocating to Cleveland in 1884, Chesnutt's family lived in a series of rental houses (on Wilcutt Avenue, Ashland Avenue, and Florence Street), and then built a home to Chesnutt's plans at 64 Brenton Street, where they lived from May 1889 until May 1904. At that time, he purchased the house at 9719 Lamont Avenue, which continued to be owned by the Chesnutt family after his death in 1932 (see Helen Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952], 37–39, 48 and 184–185). [back]
2. Starting in 1922, the Chesnutts spent every summer until Chesnutt's death in Idlewild, in Lake County, Michigan, about 380 miles northwest of Cleveland. Idlewild was a popular lakeside resort for hundreds of Black families from the urban Midwest from the 1910s to the 1960s, when racism excluded them from many resort towns. In the spring of 1924, Chesnutt purchased a plot of land, where he had a summer home built in 1925. [back]
