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Triangulating Fannie Hodgson's secret garden

by Jack Neely

This weekend at Cal State in Fresno, California, there will be a literary conference entitled "Beyond the Secret Garden." Among the speakers will be Pulitzer-winning author Alison Lurie, and scholars from the British Isles and Japan. They're expecting about 100 participants, not counting children, of which there will be several, and a reporter from the London Guardian. They're convening to discuss the life and works of Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Folks who care probably know already that the English-born author lived in Knoxville in her youth. Her late-career children's masterpiece, The Secret Garden, has been in print for about 90 years and is the basis for about half a dozen motion pictures since the silent era. Set at an ancient manor in England, it's an appealing book about Mary Lennox, an orphaned girl on the cusp of adolescence, who discovers a walled garden, shunned by adults because of an unspoken tragedy.

Considering the book's international popularity, it's not surprising that several places in England with connections to the author claim to be the "original secret garden."

Burnett herself claimed it was based on an English garden she visited as an adult.

But there might be just a little bit of Knoxville in the story. Fannie Hodgson, as we knew her, was about 15, not much older than Mary Lennox, when she moved here with her family at the end of the Civil War. They lived briefly in New Market, but spent a couple of postwar years, around 1865-68, in a modest house on a wooded hillside somewhere along Clinton Pike.

Fannie was only half-orphaned, but like Mary Lennox, family instability after a parent's death had forced her to move to a new country and circumstances that were, in many ways, frightening. Like Mary, Fannie sought a refuge in nature, in a place where she could read, and perhaps write: a hidden place in the woods she called "the Bower." It wasn't walled, or cursed, or English, but for a lonely girl in a strange place, it seems to have served a purpose similar to Mary's secret garden. For years, I pictured her leafy paradise at some unknowable point along Clinton Highway. It takes more imagination than I have.

In 1893, before she wrote The Secret Garden, Burnett wrote a lengthy biographical essay called "The One I Knew The Best Of All." Published in serial form in Scribner's, it's our best source for memories of her life here, an era she called her "Dryad Days." It's nearly pure poetry, frustratingly imprecise to a historian who likes to nail things down. She doesn't even mention Knoxville by name, and nothing about the war. But she gives us plenty of clues about the place from the perspective of a tranquil, aloof English girl. She makes it sound as if it was the best time of her life.

The Hodgsons lived in a little white house on a hill that she was pleased to call Noah's Ark. "[T]hough it was within a few miles of a place large enough to be called a town, instead of a village, it was even more sylvan" than their previous home in New Market. "It was not a very high hill, and the house was a tiny one, balanced quaintly on the summit, as if some flood had left it there on receding....

"One stood on the little porch of Noah's Ark and looked out over undergrowth and woods and slopes and hills which ended in three ranges of mountains one behind the other.... It was at this place that what were most truly the Dryad days were lived. There were no neighbors but the woods, there was no village, the town was too far away to be visited often by people who must walk. There was nothing to distract one. And the mountains always seemed to stand silently on guard....

"About a hundred yards from the house was a little thicket which was the beginning of the woods. Sassafras, sumach, dogwood, and young pines and cedars grew in the midst of a thick undergrowth of blackberry vines and bushes. The slender but full-branched trees stood very close together, and a wild grapevine roofed them with a tangled abundance....

"The walls of the Bower were branches and bushes and lovely brambles, the ceiling was boughs bearing bravely the weight of the matted vine, the carpet of it was grass and pine needles and moss."

They weren't stone walls, as in the novel. But her description of "the Bower" does contain pointed similarities to the secret garden. As in the Secret Garden, she got a couple of boys—her brothers—to help her clear the place. Her description of nature, and her place in it, is very similar to Mary Lennox's attitude. "Squirrels had no objection to her," she wrote, "rabbits occasionally came and looked, and dragonflies and beetles regarded her as of no consequence at all."

The most surprising similarity was her guide. Mary Lennox was known to follow birds to new places, including the secret garden itself. And on the outskirts of Knoxville, Fannie Hodgson "believed birds came and sang near her, under cover, for the mere fun of leading her through the woods. They would begin on a tree nearby and fly away and seem to hide again until she followed them. She always followed until she caught sight of her bird. But they had wonderful ways of eluding her, and led her over hill and dale, through thicket and brambles..."

By the time she was 16, Burnett was publishing stories in national magazines. The story goes that she sold berries from her woods to buy postage.

After that, Frances lived in various places in town. In her late teens, she lived in the house downtown remembered as Vagabondia—we know the bohemian home that became the title of her first novel was near the river, probably in the vicinity of Walnut. A boarding house still standing on Henley in the '20s had a plaque indicating it had been her home, sometimes listed as one of Knoxville's chief tourist attractions. Early 20th-century newspapers connect her to four of five different sites downtown. All are houses long gone.

But I've been puzzled running across a few stray, incongruous references to another quarter of town, the campus of Knoxville College. Newspaper articles of the 1930s and '40s refer to a shrine of some sort there. I didn't get it.

It took some connecting dots, and a good map of 1867 Knoxville, like the one that hangs in a hallway in the McClung Collection. Clinton Pike wasn't always a disjointed highway, somewhere off in the northwest. It used to come all the way into town. And it used to cross near what would be the campus of Knoxville College.

A short memoir written in the 1920s by Ada Campbell Larew, one of Burnett's few surviving childhood friends, sheds more light. In the 1860s, Ada lived with her father, Dr. Andrew Jackson Campbell, on something they called "Pern Hill," which was "about two miles from town"; the Hodgsons, then impoverished immigrants, lived on the Campbell's property, in a small house down the hill. Larew's memoir confirms it as the site of KC's campus.

That site's much closer than I assumed Noah's Ark had been. But what would later be the Knoxville College campus was nearly two miles, by road, from what was considered the town part of Knoxville. Burnett wrote, "the town was too far away to be visited often by people who must walk." I've walked that route before, and it's not that hard. Then again, it's not something I'm inclined to do often.

In 1936, there was reportedly a heap of stones on KC's campus, marking the literary spot on what was then called Flagpole Hill, where Frances Hodgson Burnett began her career. There were vague plans at the time to build a large memorial to Burnett, on the site of Noah's Ark; KC was reportedly involved, wanting to make it a music hall. However, the Depression may have dampened the blue-sky ideals for an extravagant memorial. By 1941, a newspaper story referred to the fact that the site of the author's first Knoxville home was "marked by the erection of a small tablet on the grounds of Knoxville College."

At the time of her centennial, with a major motion picture version of The Secret Garden out in theaters, a 1949 feature article, which includes an interview with her nephew, Bert, also refers to the "small marble marker on the Knoxville College campus, between the president's house and MacMillan Chapel." John Frazier, the KC president at the time, said he had hopes of installing a "better marker."

That's the last reference to it I could find. People I know who are familiar with KC's campus don't remember ever seeing it. Like all other traces of Frances Hodgson Burnett's Knoxville, it seems to have disappeared altogether.