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By Root 1482 0

Milledgeville, though sudden, was not a total disruption. Her parents had been spending time in Milledgeville ever since she was a baby. The visits were regularly covered on the Social and Society page of the Union-Recorder, the local newspaper. When she was just fifteen months old, the paper reported, “Mrs. E. F. O’Connor and little daughter, of Savannah, are visiting the Misses Cline.” In November 1937, four months before their move from Savannah, an item appeared: “Mr. and Mrs. Ed O’Connor and daughter, of Savannah, were the week-end guests of Misses Mary and Katie Cline.” The motor trips of Mrs. Katie Semmes were all documented, as were trips by the Cline aunts to Savannah.

Milledgeville was Our Town done with a middle Georgia drawl. Described by one journalist as “a styling epicenter for the Deep South,” the sleepy community at the dead center of Georgia, with barely six thousand residents, blended provincial conservatism with much local color. “We have a girls’ college here,” O’Connor wrote, in the early fifties, “but the lacy atmosphere is fortunately destroyed by a reformatory, an insane asylum, and a military school.” Georgia State College for Women did provide the town’s grace notes — a steady supply of male and female professors. The reformatory was Georgia State Training School for Boys; the military school, Georgia Military College. Yet because of State Hospital, previously named Milledgeville Lunatic Asylum, the town was mostly synonymous, in Georgia slang, with “going crazy.” As one miffed character says to another in Clock Without Hands, by Carson McCullers, who grew up in Columbus, 130 miles away, “‘A thing like this makes me think you ought to be in Milledgeville.’”

Though hardly as cosmopolitan as Savannah, this fourth capital of Georgia from 1803 until 1868 was built on a similar geometric plan. As Nelle Womack Hines pointed out in her Treasure Album, the capital city, named for Governor John Milledge, “probably has the distinction of being one of two cities thus molded into shape for such a purpose, the other being our National Capital, Washington, D.C.” The original plan reserved four large squares for a capitol, governor’s mansion, penitentiary, and cemetery, with nineteen wide streets intersecting at right angles. Dubbed “a town of columns,” Milledgeville became identified with a “Milledgeville Federal” style of architecture, marked by colossal porticoes, cantilevered balconies, pediments adorned with sunbursts, and fanlit doorways. When O’Connor’s professor friend Ted Spivey visited, he found this early style “idealistic,” as opposed to the town’s midcentury Greek Revival mansions, recalling “the fanaticism of cotton barons defending slavery and states’ rights.”

Peabody Elementary, where Mary Flannery completed seventh grade, was an all-white school, mostly attended by girls. White boys typically went to Georgia Military College, fittingly located in the Gothic Revival Old State House of the Confederacy, with pointed arch windows and gray battlements, the scene of the Secession Convention of 1861. (“If war comes I’ll drink every drop of blood that’s shed,” Robert Toombs promised in one of the convention’s rallying speeches.) The Milledgeville City Cemetery, where Mary Flannery’s Cline and Treanor relatives were buried, was divided, with graves for whites on higher ground, and those for blacks, including slave plots, on the southern edge running steeply down to Fishing Creek. The Cline family had a decent legacy with the blacks in town, though. When Mayor Peter Cline, Jr., died, in 1916, the pastor of the Colored Presbyterian Church wrote a tribute, praising the mayor’s advocating “in public the rights of our race.”

The Ward-Beall-Cline Mansion at 311 West Greene Street, where mother and daughter moved that spring, while Ed O’Connor visited on weekends, was one of about forty remaining antebellum homes. A traditional Federal clapboard house, with four white, fluted, Ionic columns — built by General John B. Gordon in 1820 and used briefly as the Governor’s Mansion in 1838 and 1839 — the Cline Mansion