Dekalb County GaArchives Biographies.....Harrison, Emily Stewart January 6, 1874 - September 3, 1973 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/gafiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Lois Harrison Colwell http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00031.html#0007623 January 22, 2012, 12:46 pm Source: unpublished Author: Lois Harrison Colwell Emily Stewart Harrison 1874-1973 Emily Stewart Harrison was the oldest child of Zadok Daniel and Laura Hendree Harrison of Fernbank, DeKalb County, Georgia. Emily was born the 6th of January 1874 in Atlanta, Fulton County, Georgia and died the 3rd of September 1973 in Atlanta, Fulton County, Georgia. Emily's family moved to their country home which she named “Fernbank” in the late 1800's. Emily never married and spent her life in education, either being educated or being the educator. No matter where life took Emily, her heart was always at Fernbank. This is a letter found at Emory University Library in the Emily S. Harrison Special Collections, copied on July 10th, 2007 by her great niece, Lois Colwell. It is an unfinished and unsigned letter dated Feb. 22, 1891 to a Miss Bowen, written by unknown, but thought to be written by Emily Harrison describing her new home, Fern Bank. Emily was 17 years of age at the time this letter was written. “Dear Miss Bowen, So many things have happened since I last wrote to you I hardly know what to tell you of first. The very best thing that makes me happiest, is that Papa has built for us a summer home in the country. Not a village home, but a real wild woods home. In truth, it is only about four miles from Atlanta but who would dream that the city is so near? The woods are all around, the great trees growing so tall and close together that in some places the sun can hardly find its way through to flicker on the carpet of brown leaves and pine needles that strew the ground. Of course there had to be an immense amount of clearing done though Papa teasingly said I wept over every tree that was cut and would never allow him to clear the snags out of the brook for fear he would spoil the beauty of nature. It did seem a pity to touch anything. Nature had done so much for the place. The land lies beautifully. The house is situated on top of a high hill, on two sides are brooks which flow together in front and form what the country people, unpoetically call Pea-vine creek. I can catch a glimpse from my window of this stream as it winds like a silver thread between its fern-fringed banks. To have such a home as this has always been my Castle in the Air. Yet it was such a wild dream I could never put much faith in it and now that it has come true – why I think I never was so wholly, so contentedly happy, as I was last summer. How did I spend the long days? Why there were the whole woods to roam through. What rambles I took over the hills – exploring expeditions I called them – coming home laden down with woodland treasurers, ferns, mosses, lichens and wild flowers. So many and such a variety of flowers I think I have never seen in any other woods. They lasted all summer from the early big blue violets of May till the golden rod and asters of late October. How I wished sometimes for Mrs. Owens to learn from her the name of some rare or curious plant that I had discovered. Then there wer the long drives along country roads, or better still galloping horse back rides. But the happiest hours of all were those spent reading in a hammock out under the trees. I must tell you about this reading room of ours, “The Rest”, we called it. You smile, but if you could see the spot you would think it appropriately named. It is at the foot of the hill. On one side is a great boulder in coloring shading from dark olive green to rich browns and silvery grays with a delicate tracery of mosses and vines; on another is the hill upon which Maiden Hair ferns are growing, on the third side is the brook, while the forth is but a continuation of the beach and maple grove, this small part of which we have claimed from the woods as our own. Here we had rustic slate built, here we swing our hammocks, and here we would come in the heat of the day, finding no matter how hot it was else where here it was always cool, shady and restful. But hammocks I am convinced are a snare of the evil one. Nothing else is so productive of laziness. How much I had expected to accomplish during these summer days in the way of reading and studying! Truly I made heroic efforts to keep my good resolutions.....” Two newspaper articles help tell the story of Emily Harrison - quoting: In 1986 the DeKalb Extra wrote the following article: SPOTLIGHT ON WOMEN WOMEN THROUGH THE AGES HAVE HELPED SHAPE STATE'S HISTORY by Sarah Cash, staff writer “Women today play much more of an active role in government and the business world than in the past. But that is not to say their sisterly ancestors lacked influence. From author Margaret Mitchell to Atlanta's former namesake Martha Lumpkin Compton, a number of women from the metropolitan area have helped shape Georgia's history. DEKALB COUNTY EMILY HARRISON Emily Harrison saw her impossible dream fulfilled months short of 100th birthday in 1974. The teacher and naturalist saved DeKalb County's Fernbank Forest – virgin woodland in the heart of a metropolis – and preserved the 65 acres as a teaching tool for children. A teacher for 10 years at the State Normal School, now a part of the University of Georgia, Miss Emily's residence from age 15 until 67 was in the forest off Clifton Road. Her father, Zadok Harrison, owned most of the forest, which she named Fernbank because of the ferns growing there. She gave more than half a century to education, either studying for or as a teacher in public and private schools in Massachusetts, North Carolina, and the Washington Seminary in Atlanta. She and her sister, Fanneal, founded and directed the Out-of-Door School in Sarasota, Florida. For her ultimate teaching experience, she envisioned a school in Fernbank Forest as a long-term nature preserve. In 1908, she had an architect draw plans for “The School-in-the-Woods,” as she called it. She shared the forest with Girl Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, the Atlanta Bird Club and the Georgia Botanical Society. After the death of her father in 1935, Miss Emily, one of10heirs, was afraid that the property would be sold piecemeal for development, so the determined 5 foot-tall woman enlisted the help of citizens to buy the property. Interested Druid Hills citizens formed Fernbank, Inc., and largely through the influence of Miss Emily, they succeeded in purchasing the entire Harrison tract for $35,000. The late Jim Cherry, former superintendent of DeKalb Schools, saw the potential in using the primeval forest as a living laboratory. Then, in 1964, Miss Emily saw her dream achieved when a 48-year lease was signed between Fernbank and the DeKalb Board of Education. Three years later, Fernbank Science Center, complete with an astronomical observatory and planetarium, opened with funds from a voter- approved bond issue. The newest facility for Fernbank will be its museum of natural history, a $20 million facility expected to be finished in 1989.” THE ATLANTA JOURNAL, WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 12, 1973 EMILY HARRISON OLD FOREST AFFECTION IS NOW A DEKALB LEGACY by Dorothy Nix “Because a little girl loved a forest thousands of other children today walk its pathways and learn its delight just as she did more than 90 years ago. That little girl was Miss Emily Harrison, daughter of an old and distinguished DeKalb County family, who died last week at the age of 99 years. The woods she loved, surrounding a fern-bordered stream, is now DeKalb County School System's Fernbank Forest, a name she herself chose when she was a child. The forest once surrounded the Harrison family's country place, a peaceful haven in the years following the War Between the States when Atlanta families had begun to look for ways to get out of the growing city. Miss Harrison, in an interview several years before her death, told of her happy childhood years in the DeKalb forest before she grew up to become a teacher, newspaper editor and ardent conservationist. Long before ecology became a national concern, she was turning over in her mind how to save the family's forest. At 61 she went back to the University of Georgia to study forestry and landscape gardening because after her father's death in 1935, “I didn't know what would become of the forest and wanted to know as much as I possibly could. I stayed in the dorm and had the best time.” Her family could have sold the land at a great profit many times but the Harrison heirs held on to it, sometimes at a great sacrifice, finally delivering it into the hands of the school system to be “saved and preserved in perpetuity.” In her early nineties, Miss Harrison was still having “the best time” visiting the forest to see what the school system was doing with it, driving from the retirement home on Peachtree Street where she spent her last years, following the paths she had made in the forest long ago. More than three-quarters of a century ago she had driven out there with her father behind a horse-drawn carriage from the then fashionable section of Atlanta—Capitol and Washington Avenues. She recalled then all the families in the neighborhood had gone to Mt. Airy or Lithia Springs or White Sulphur Springs and fathers had commuted to the resorts by train. Well-behaved and well-brought-up children were expected to dress up and go down to the depots to meet the trains. Miss Harrison said she hated that and begged her father to build on the forest land he owned in DeKalb County, fronting on unpaved Clifton Road. At that time her father Col. Z. D. Harrison was clerk of the Supreme Court of Georgia, a post he held for 66 years, the longest anyone ever held an elective office in Georgia, she said. At first the Harrisons thought in terms of a log cabin for their country acres. They had in the meantime moved from Atlanta to Decatur and owned a substantial house where the Christian Science Church now stands on Clairmont Avenue. But their early plans for Fernbank gradually evolved into a four-story mansion of stone and heart pine with wide porches and a big attic dormitory where Harrison cousins came to spend the summer. Miss Harrison recalled the house echoed with the sounds of “wonderful Halloween and Christmas parties to which all children were invited and came for miles across the fields.” These small visitors were the first of generations of children who would be welcomed to Fernbank Forest as campers and hikers along its winding trails. Three generations of Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls held summer camps there before the DeKalb School System took oveer the wooded hills and glens. Now school buses arrive every school day from some where in Georgia, to deliver eager busloads of children to nature study classes. This was a special delight to Miss Harrison who taught in the classroom for more than half of long life. After study at Radcliffe College she had studied at the Sorbonne and then earned a degree at Chicago University. She earned a master's degree at the University of Georgia in 1918 when women were admitted only to the graduate school. A friend of Canterbury Court, where Miss Harrison lived until her death, paid tribute to the retirement home's distinguished citizen in a short article about her in “Cantebury Tales.” She said Miss Harrison's favorite quotation came from Dag Hammarskjold and seems especially fitting in the light of her legacy –her beloved Fernbank-- which she leaves for generations which follow her. “For all that has been— thanks. To all that shall be—yes.” Note: Growing up, my great aunt, Emily wrote to me, sent me her favorite books to read and when I graduated from high school I visited Georgia and met her for the first time. She was living in Cantebury Court when we last visited. She asked me if I had ever seen Fernbank? When I replied I had not, she asked me to visit it. She said, “no one needed to go any farther than Atlanta in the Spring to see the real beauty of this earth.” Her obit: HARRISON – Miss Emily Stewart, of 750 Peachtree Rd., NE, died Sept. 3, 1973. Surviving are her sisters, Mrs. Brantley Weathers, Orlando, Florida, Miss Fanneal Harrison, Sarasota, Florida, several nieces and nephews. Internment services will be held Wednesday, Sept. 5, at 2 o'clock at West View. Rev. Hendree Harrison officiating. H. M. Patterson & Son, Spring Hill. File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/ga/dekalb/bios/harrison994gbs.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/gafiles/ File size: 13.0 Kb