Southern Writers at Monteagle
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Artist at Monteagle

Southern Writers at Monteagle, also, Artist at Monteagle. . Monteagle Sunday School Assembly was founded in 1882 as the Southern Chautauqua, modeled on the original Chautauqua, known by the name of the lake on which it is located in western New York. The first Chautauqua was founded by a Methodist bishop and a Methodist layman to be a cultural center, a home for concerts and lectures and other programs designed to interest residents and visitors who gathered every summer at its spacious resort of lakeside cottages. Monteagle was founded in the mountains of Southeastern Tennessee by Christian laymen of several denominations, primarily as a place where Sunday School teachers could live and study during the summer, hence it took the name of Monteagle Sunday School Assembly. It was meant to be a Southern version of the original Chautauqua, though it was ecumenical in character from the beginning. While fulfilling its purpose as an educational and cultural center, it attracted some of the best known Southern writers to live and work there. Their association with Monteagle caused it in time to become identified as a Southern Writers Colony, not merely a Southern Chautauqua but a Southern Concord., Concord, Massachusetts, gained its fame as the village in the woods west of Boston where outstanding New England writers like Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne chose to live, making it the first shrine of American literature in the nineteenth century. Monteagle, as the place where noted Southern writers like Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, and Peter Taylor chose to live, became a comparable shrine of American literature in the twentieth century. It was Peter Taylor, who owned a cottage at Monteagle for many years, who fictionalized it as "Owl Mountain Springs, and used it as a setting for a play, a novel, and a story. His good friend, the New England poet Robert Lowell, came to Monteagle because Andrew Lytle and Allen Tate were living there and editing The Sewanee Review. Lowell's debt to them as writers and reachers was so great that he would later say, "I don't suppose I would have ever written again if it hadn't been for that year in Monteagle, 1942-43.", Andrew Lytle was the Southern writer who lived longest at Monteagle, in a log cabin which had been owned by his family, but Allen Tate often rented cottages there in the summer, and Peter Taylor rented and later owned a cottage in the Assembly, where he did much of his writing. These three writers brought many other writers to visit them at Monteagle, more often as guests than as residents. Among the writers who came were three of the original Fugitive poets from Vanderbilt, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren, and along with them came such other noted Southern writers as Caroline Gordon, a novelist from Kentucky, and Randall Jarrell, a poet and critic from Nashville, as well as the English novelist Ford Madox Ford, and the New England poet Robert Lowell with his first wife, Jean Stafford, a novelist. Donald Davidson, in a late poem called "Lines Written for Allen Tate on his Sixtieth Anniversary," imagined that Monteagle had become the shrine to which all Southern writers were naturally drawn.,

"To join the long procession where it winds , Up to a mountain home , No marshals but the Muses for this day..."

, Monteagle was the "mountain home" where Allen Tate did some of his best writing, as poet, novelist, and critic, to make him one of the most admired Southern writers. Andrew Lytle, a close friend of Tate, dedicated his career to writing fiction and essays, and to fostering Southern letters. He lived many years in The Log Cabin (1890), where, as novelist, critic and editor, he drew many writers to Monteagle, and as he remembered in a memoir:, "Summer Oaks and Shadow Lawn, houses next door to my cabin...were frequently occupied by poets and writers Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, Peter Taylor, Robert Penn Warren, Eleanor Ross, Peter's wife, Ford Madox Ford, Donald Davidson; others were transients. Once the Allen Tates this first wife was the novelist Caroline Gordon) stayed here over the winter... We made a fine, interesting out-of-season community...", To Lytle, who knew it best, "All along, this place has been congenial for artists," and in his view "The history of Monteagle Sunday School Assembly admonishes the present to continue to be a place to promulgate and cultivate the arts, and that means artists”., Acknowledgement. Dr. William Pratt, Professor of English Emeritus, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, Photo caption (top center): Caroline Gordon Tate, Anne Goodwin Winslow, Andrew Lytle, Edna Langdon Barker Lytle, Nancy Tate, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, in Monteagle, Tenn., 1943. , Photo caption (top left): Allen Tate, Marcella Comes, and Robert Lowell at Monteagle 1941. , Photo caption (right middle): Jean Stafford , Photo caption (left bottom): Peter Taylor and Eleanor Ross on their wedding day, June 4, 1943, with Allen Tate at St. Andrew's , Backside of marker , William Brantley Smith, known as Brantley Smith, was born in Lascassas, Tennessee February 5, 1874. He painted in the States, France and Italy, and maintained studios in Monteagle, Tennessee, Newport, Rhode Island and Palm Beach, Florida. He spent much of his life in or near Montaeagle and many of his paintings reflect his love of the mountain and Sequatchie Valley., Brantley Smith studied art with William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, Frank V. DuMond, and F. Luis Mora at the Chase School of Art in New York City around the turn of the 20th century where he established himself to be a painter in the American Impressionist style., Early in the 1900's Brantley Smith came to Monteagle Sunday School Assembly. In 1902 he met Christine Priest in Monteagle whom he married in 1906. During this time he established a studio and became a member of the Monteagle Sunday School Assembly art faculty. He taught many young artists in Monteagle and also in Nashville., Circa 1905, he began painting on the resort circuit starting in Newport, Rhode Island. He further worked at resorts in Hot Springs, Virginia, Lakewood, New Jersey, Lake Placid, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, among other venues. He primarily painted portraits on commission, exhibited and sold landscapes and still life paintings., During World War I, Brantley Smith served with the YMCA Expeditionary Forces in England and France. He cared for and entertained soldiers on leave from the front lines. He was an accomplished musician and vocalist. In addition, he is known to have sketched portraits of many soldiers for them to send home., Upon returning to Monteagle after World War I, he painted a very large mural of a Sequatchie Valley mountain scene which was applied to the back of the Monteagle Assembly Auditorium stage. In 1926 his 10 year old daughter Christine was in the audience watching a film. She saw smoke at the edges of the screen before people realized that the auditorium had caught fire. She reported that people rushed to the stage to try and tear the mural from the wall but could not do so; it was destroyed along with the auditorium., Within the first and second quarters of the 20th century, Brantley Smith illustrated covers for the program for Camp Unaka, a summer camp for girls at Monteagle, and further illustrated some of the early Monteagle Sunday School Assembly programs. He was the illustrator for numerous other publications including The Kind Word, A Paper for Young People; Boys Companion; and The Olympian., In the Assembly grounds, Brantley Smith maintained a garden beside his family cottage "The Oaks" and is said to have kept roses in constant bloom in Woodcock Park. In this garden were flowers he beautifully arranged that became the subject of many of his paintings. In addition he crafted monuments and garden structures made of stone that still stand in the Assembly grounds., Brantley Smith loved Monteagle and Broad Mountain where it is located and the colors of the light and the landscape there. He painted at many locations around the mountain. Franklin Taylor, who often drove him from place to place in a Model T Ford, spoke of a time when Brantley Smith was working on a painting:, "On this particular day he was in a real hurry to catch some fall scene and just working like mad. I was fussing him because he had another place to go. As I watched him, he was being very meticulous with the foreground and little pieces of sage and stuff...I said, 'Mr. Smith, why waste so much time on the foreground there...and you are putting colors into it that's not even there.' I criticized it. He replied, 'Son, when you do a picture you can walk into, you have done something.", Brantley Smith created paintings a person can walk into. With his use of color and light one is able to feel what it is like to be in that place or with that person., Throughout most of the 1930's and 1940's Brantley Smith continued to maintain an art studio during winters in Palm Beach and during summers in Monteagle., Still painting, he died in Monteagle on July 31, 1947., Acknowledgments: Authors-Harriet Smith Pontius, Thomas Priest Teasley, and Bettie Teasley Hill , Paintings-Collections of Bettie Teasley Hill and Thomas Priest Teasley , Photography-Christine Teasley. , Image caption (right top): Lady in White with Parasol , Image caption (left top): Gardens at "The Oaks" , Image caption (right bottom): Foster Falls , Image caption (left bottom): Juniata Creek in MSSA