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1 The Everetts of Atlanta THE EVERETT FAMILY was not of the Old South, but, then, neither was Atlanta. Willis Mead Everett and his new bride settled there in 1888, less than fifty years after Atlanta was established as a railroad and commercial center. Everett was of old Yankee stock, with roots that extended back, on his father’s side, to seventeenth-century Massachusetts and, on his mother’s, to Kiliaen van Rennselaer, first patroon of Rennselaerwyck in New Holland. Timothy, his father, had commanded a company of the sixty-fourth New York Infantry during the Civil War, and it was in the midst of that terrible conflict that Willis was born, on November 18, 1863, in Randolph, New York, south of Buffalo and about twelve miles north of the border with Pennsylvania. He graduated from Chamberlain Institute and Female College in Randolph at the age of sixteen and, in 1885, received his A.B. from Allegheny College in Meadeville , Pennsylvania. While a student at Allegheny, he read law in the afternoons with Judge John H. Henderson, of the Pennsylvania Court of Appeals, although his initial postbaccalaureate employment was as professor of mathematics and German at Chamberlain. Also prior to graduation from Allegheny, he served as a passenger agent for steamboats plying Lake Chautauqua, a few miles west of Randolph, in the course of which he met his future wife, Mary Catherine Gillette, born in Schenectady but now of Atlanta, who may have been attending one of the enormously popular adult education sessions held nearby. In 1886, Everett moved to Cincinnati, where he was admitted to the Ohio bar and opened a law office with his brother, Charles. The practice does not appear to have prospered, as much of his income was earned by tutoring students in German, Latin, and mathematics. But his courtship of Mary Gillette was more successful. He visited her in Atlanta during the Christmas season of that year, and, following the death of her mother, the two were married on August 15, 1887. By then, Willis Everett had departed Cincinnati for Illinois and had opened a law office in Chicago. 1 He and his bride remained there little more than a year before settling permanently in Atlanta in the fall of 1888.1 The only direct surviving evidence to explain the motivation for the Everetts’ migration south is a much later comment, in their son’s hand, that notes laconically that “Chicago was too cold for Mother.”2 A winter on Lake Michigan may well have been grim for one who had become accustomed to the mild climate of Georgia, but the reasons may have extended beyond the meteorological. The Atlanta of 1888 had long since recovered from the devastation of Sherman’s “visit” of 1864 and was booming. The 1880s were a pivotal period in the history of Atlanta; it was in that decade that the city emerged as the economic dynamo of the southeastern United States. Its population nearly doubled during the decade, to more than 65,000, and the volume of its commerce approximately tripled. Moreover, the commercial leaders of Atlanta energetically publicized their city’s economic dynamism beyond the South and assured northerners that an enthusiastic welcome awaited them. Even Sherman had been cordially received in 1879, when recollections of the unpleasantness of fifteen years earlier had been limited to jocular references to the guest’s “carelessness with matches!”3 In short, Atlanta offered in all respects an appealing climate. Everett was admitted to the Georgia bar and opened a law office in the Judge Marshall Clark Building on Alabama Street. His general practice was a profitable one, and Everett moved easily into the growing haute bourgeoisie of Atlanta. The concomitants of professional success and social acceptance—a bank directorship and membership in the prestigious Atlanta Lawyers’ Club— were combined with the kind of constructive community service expected of persons of “comfortable” circumstances and, in the case of the Everetts, freely given. They were both active in church affairs; Willis’s dedication was eventually rewarded by his election as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U.S. on the second ballot of its seventy-eighth convocation in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1938. Everett’s successful acculturation was reflected by a benevolent paternalism toward African Americans, which was common among Atlanta ’s “better” families, and he provided long service as a trustee of two African American institutions, Clark University and Gammon Theological Seminary.4 Professional...

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