Famous Visitors
Archive
Except from article by Kit Lane from SDHC newsletter insert , page 63-64
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There were a number of famous Chicago writers who lived or visited along the west Michigan lakeshore. The father of Edgar Lee Masters, Hardin W. Masters, owned Wavecrest south of Douglas still in Saugatuck Township (but with a Fennville mailing address) and his famous son often visited. This property was later a cottage resort. The poet himself had a cottage at Spring Lake for several years.
Literary critics from the beginning noted the similarities between Masters' Spoon River Anthology and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and, although the two writers were acquainted they were not especially good friends. However in 1916 Anderson took as the second of his four wives, a Jackson, Michigan, native named Tennessee Mitchell who had been a girlfriend of Masters' 1909 to 1910. It is probably no coincidence that also in 1916 Masters uses an incident from his courtship with Tennessee in the romantic poem "In Michigan" which was published in "Songs and Satires." The opening lines are:
You wrote:
"Come over to Saugatuck
And be with me on the warm sand,
And under cool beeches and aromatic cedars."
And just then no one could do a thing in the city
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Carl Sandburg, another of the Chicago writers, and a friend of both Masters and Anderson, visited Douglas as early as 1908 and lived from 1926 to 1945 on the Lake Michigan shore at Harbert, near Benton Harbor.
L. Frank Baum, writer of the Oz stories had a cottage at Macatawa, on the south side of Macatawa Bay near Holland but within the boundaries of Allegan County, from 1899 to 1909.
Margaret Anderson, founder of The Little Review, a literary magazine based in Chicago beginning in 1914 and later in New York and Paris, was a frequent visitor to Saugatuck where her sister, Mrs. Jean Palmer, owned The Little Ferry Store on the west side of the river 1940-49. Although no relative Margaret Anderson was well acquainted with both Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg.
Famous visitors to the Saugatuck area will be a feature of the 1998 exhibit "Heroes, Rogues and Just Plain Folks." Visitors in addition to Rickey so far discovered include Amelia Earhart, Carl Sandburg, pianist Paderewski, Thor Heyerdahl, Christian writer E. Stanley Jones, actor Robby Benson, Susan B. Anthony, Magic Johnson, and the model that posed for Salvadore Dali's "Crucifixion."
2023.50.31
Kit Lane's 2005 book "Saugatuck Visitors 1848-2003" covers James Fenimore Cooper, Francis B. Stockbridge, Mrs. John Hull, Captain Frederick Pabst, David C. Cook, Pokagon family, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Thomas Eddy Tallmadge, Bolton Brothers, Countess Bernadette, E. Stanley Jones, Carrie Snodgrass, Burr Tillstrom, Alice Cooper and REO Speedwagon.
SDHS NL Inserts
Winthers, Sally
Digital data in CatalogIt
This information was OCR text scanned from SDHS newsletter supplements. A binder of original paper copies is catalog item 2023.50.01
11/09/2023
02/02/2024