Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell (November 8, 1900 – August 16, 1949)[5] was an American novelist and journalist. Mitchell wrote only one novel, published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel Gone with the Wind, for which she won the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936[6] and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. In recent years long after her death, a collection of Mitchell’s girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, titled Lost Laysen, have been published. A collection of newspaper articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form.

Margaret Mitchell was a Southerner and a native and lifelong resident of Georgia. She was born in 1900 into a wealthy and politically prominent family. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, was an attorney, and her mother, Mary Isabel “Maybelle” Stephens, was a suffragist. She had two brothers, Russell Stephens Mitchell, who died in infancy in 1894, and Alexander Stephens Mitchell, born in 1896.[7][8]

Eugene Muse Mitchell, the father of Margaret Mitchell
Mitchell’s family on her father’s side were descendants of Thomas Mitchell, originally of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, who settled in Wilkes County, Georgia in 1777, and served in the American Revolutionary War. Thomas Mitchell was a surveyor by profession. He was on a surveying trip in Henry County, Georgia, at the home of Mr. John Lowe, about 6 miles from McDonough, Georgia, when he died in 1835 and is buried in that location.[9] William Mitchell, born December 8, 1777, in Lisborn, Edgefield County, South Carolina, moved between 1834-1835, to a farm along the South River in the Flat Rock Community in Georgia.[9] William Mitchell died February 24, 1859, at the age of 81 and is buried in the family graveyard near Panola Mountain State Park.[9] Her great grandfather Issac Green Mitchell moved to farm along the Flat Shoals Road located in the Flat Rock community in 1839. Four years later he sold this farm to Ira O. McDaniel and purchased a farm 3 miles farther down the road on the north side of the South River in DeKalb County, Georgia.[9]

Her grandfather, Russell Crawford Mitchell, of Atlanta, enlisted in the Confederate States Army on June 24, 1861, and served in Hood’s Texas Brigade. He was severely wounded at the Battle of Sharpsburg, demoted for “inefficiency,” and detailed as a nurse in Atlanta.[10] After the Civil War, he made a large fortune supplying lumber for the rapid rebuilding of Atlanta. Russell Mitchell had thirteen children from two wives; the eldest was Eugene, who graduated from the University of Georgia Law School.[7][11][12]

Mitchell’s maternal great-grandfather, Philip Fitzgerald, emigrated from Ireland and eventually settled on a slaveholding plantation, Rural Home, near Jonesboro, Georgia, where he had one son and seven daughters with his wife, Elenor. Mitchell’s grandparents, married in 1863, were Annie Fitzgerald and John Stephens; he had also emigrated from Ireland and became a Captain in the Confederate States Army. John Stephens was a prosperous real estate developer after the Civil War and one of the founders of the Gate City Street Railroad (1881), a mule-drawn Atlanta trolley system. John and Annie Stephens had twelve children together; the seventh child was May Belle Stephens, who married Eugene Mitchell.[12][13][14] May Belle Stephens had studied at the Bellevue Convent in Quebec and completed her education at the Atlanta Female Institute.[8]:13

Photo of a young woman (likely Mitchell) on the front porch of Rural Home circa 1920.
The Atlanta Constitution reported that May Belle Stephens and Eugene Mitchell were married at the Jackson Street mansion of the bride’s parents on November 8, 1892:

the maid of honor, Miss Annie Stephens, was as pretty as a French pastel, in a directoire costume of yellow satin with a long coat of green velvet sleeves, and a vest of gold brocade…The bride was a fair vision of youthful loveliness in her robe of exquisite ivory white and satin…her slippers were white satin wrought with pearls…an elegant supper was served. The dining room was decked in white and green, illuminated with numberless candles in silver candlelabras…The bride’s gift from her father was an elegant house and lot…At 11 o’clock Mrs. Mitchell donned a pretty going-away gown of green English cloth with its jaunty velvet hat to match and bid goodbye to her friends.[15]