Edmund Vance "Buck" Cooke Jr. to Charles W. Chesnutt, 27 January 1932
| Textual Feature | Appearance |
|---|---|
| alterations to base text (additions or deletions) | added or deleted text |
| passage deleted with a strikethrough mark | |
| passage deleted by overwritten added text | Deleted text Added text |
| position of added text (if not added inline) | [right margin] text added in right margin; [above line] text added above the line |
| proofreading mark | ‸ |
| page number, repeated letterhead, etc. | page number or repeated letterhead |
| supplied text | [supplied text] |
| archivist note | archivist note |
3715 Prospect Ave.
Cleveland, Ohio
Jan 27, 1932.
Mr. Charles W. Chestnutt
9719 Lamont Ave.
Cleveland, Ohio
Dear Mr. Chestnutt:
Two or three years ago I called upon you with the purpose of determining if any sharesin the Chester Cliffs Club property were for sale.1 Tempus has fugitted, as is ists way, and I am now more imminently on the point of getting me a plot of ground than I was then.2 Therefore I am writing you by way ofmaking a final canvass of the Chester possibilities before I turn my efforts away finally to other prospects.
I do not suppose that either you or Helen3 are in the market, but it occurred to me that the owner of the onetime Miller,4 then Counts,5 now ??? cottage—which you aptly term "the stone abortion"—might be, by some chance.6 If you can, I would appreciate your giving me the name and ddaddress of that party that I may approach him or her.
My real desire is not for anybody's cottage, but for a piece of unencumbered ground upon which I may look forward to erecting something to my own taste. Accordingly, if the owner of the stone abortion has only one share, am I right in assuming that it confers the right to build only on the ground where the cottage now stands?
May I hope to hear frroom you in the nerar future? You can reach me by phone, if you prefer, during the day at PRospect 0909; in the evening at ENdicott 9456.
P.S. I enjoyed your article in "The Colophon," now some months since.7
Correspondent: Edmund Vance "Buck" Cooke, Jr. (1905–1976) was a visual artist who worked at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in the 1930s and was interested in joining the Chester Cliffs Club to move to the countryside. In 1939 he moved to a farm near Peninsula in the Cuyahoga Valley with his family. His father, Edmund Vance "Buck" Cooke (1866–1932) was a well-known Cleveland poet and, like Chesnutt and Dickerson Donahey, a member of the Tresart Club that was founded around the same time as 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 to purchase 11 acres of land near Chesterland, Ohio, 20 miles from Cleveland in northwestern Geauga County, where they spent summers away from the city. Three cottages were built, and in 1916 the Chesnutts purchased one of these. In 1921 Chesnutt, as the club president, took on the responsibility of reminding members of tax payments and calling the annual meeting. The corporation was never legally dissolved. [back]
2. "Tempus fugit," Latin for "time flies," is a phrase from Virgil's Georgics (ca. 29 BCE). [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. Eula (Eulalie) 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 Community, 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, and owned a farm near Lightfoot, Virginia. [back]
5. 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 Eula (Eulalie) Gaskill Miller Counts (1869–1942). In 1930 Counts was given an 18-month prison sentence for embezzlement in a fraudulent divorce case; he was paroled in December of 1931. [back]
6. Cooke did not know the name of the current owner of the cottage, Mary Ellen Delahunte, who had purchased it from A. Frank Counts and his wife Eulalie Miller Counts. [back]
7. The Colophon: A Book Collector's Quarterly was a high-quality, high-cost periodical edited by Elmer Adler (1884–1962), a book collector and graphic designer. Published in its original large format only from 1930 until 1935 (and only sporadically between 1935 and 1948), it included Chesnutt's essay "Post Bellum, Pre-Harlem" in Part 5 (February 1931). The Colophon was available only by subscription ($15 a year), and at its most successful printed in runs of 3,000 copies (parts 5-12). [back]
