Charles W. Chesnutt was the first commercially successful American fiction writer of mixed race. While he experienced much early success with the short stories he penned in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, his efforts at the beginning of the twentieth century to become equally successful as a novelist failed because of the unwillingness of the American public to buy a sufficient number of his books. America was at that time just not yet ready for novels that exposed at length and in great detail the ugliness and ridiculousness of the "color line" that then existed in the U.S., a line which — though applied in different ways in the North and South — nonetheless in all places limited persons of color from fully exercising their rights and liberties, simply because of the color of their skin. After the commercial failure in 1905 of his third novel, The Colonel's Dream, Chesnutt, at age 47, gave up on his dream — with that novel being the final one published during his lifetime. Had Chesnutt's contemporary, Mark Twain, been similarly discouraged in his literary career at a similar age, many of his novels that we have all come to know, love and cherish, would never have been written. Following Chesnutt's death 27 years later in 1932, his works were, for decades, largely forgotten. In the 1960's, they experienced a short-lived revival, but it wasn't until the early twenty-first century that critics and readers alike finally began to recognize the literary brilliance of his work and his unique insights into the problems of race in America in the post-Civil War/pre-Harlem Renaissance period. Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on June 20, 1858. His parents, Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and Anna Marie Sampson, both of whom were biracial and free, had fled their hometown of Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1856, because the rights and liberties of free blacks living in the South were being severely curtailed in that decade which led up to America's Civil War. While Andrew Chesnutt initially headed to Indiana to live with an uncle there, Anna Sampson, her mother Chloe and her stepfather Moses Harris headed to Cleveland where, since the early 1850s, biracial families from North Carolina and other Southern states had been settling in an area of the city near Hudson (East 30th) Street, north and south of what is today Central Avenue. There, these families — almost all of whom were headed by men who were carpenters, masons or other tradesmen — had formed a small but vibrant biracial community amid a white population composed mostly of German and Irish immigrants. Among the biracial families who had settled there earlier in the decade was the Cicero M. and Sarah Harris Richardson family. Cicero was a mason by trade who later became a "plasterer." Census and other public records suggest that Sarah was very likely a niece of Moses Harris. Upon arriving in Cleveland, Moses Harris, who was a carpenter by trade, purchased (according to County tax records) a house on Hudson Street that was just a few houses from the home of Cicero and Sarah Richardson. The following year, Andrew Chesnutt left Indiana, moved to Cleveland, married Anna Marie Sampson, and became a member of the Harris household. A year later, Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born. Except for parts of the years 1859 and 1860, when his parents temporarily relocated to Oberlin, Ohio, Charles Chesnutt spent the first eight years of his life growing up in his grandparents' house on Hudson Street. He likely played with both black and white children who lived nearby and, though there are no extant school records to confirm it, he likely attended, at least for several years, nearby Hudson Street School (later, Sterling School), an integrated public elementary school which was founded in 1859 and which stood on the southwest corner of Sibley (today, Carnegie) Avenue and Hudson, less than a quarter-mile walk from his home. In these early years of his life in Cleveland, Charles Chesnutt would have also been witness to significant events in the neighborhood like the construction in 1864 of the original Shiloh Baptist Church on Hudson, just down the street from his grandparents' house. Undoubtedly, he would have thought it cool that his relative and neighbor, Cicero Richardson, a founder of that church, played a significant role in the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone for the new church by "the order of colored masons" on August 1st of that year. Moreover, in addition to the impact upon him of this event and his likely attendance at Hudson Street school, young Chesnutt would have likely also been impacted, or shaped, by the nearby Richardson family, which occasionally would expand with visits by Sarah Richardson's mother and siblings who had moved to Cleveland in the late 1850s, where they lived on Ohio Street (today, Carnegie Avenue near East 14th Street). He perhaps would have been most affected by visits from Sarah's brilliant younger brothers, Robert and Cicero Harris, who, in the early 1860s, were young adults. These brothers, just a few years later, would play an even greater role in the shaping of Charles Chesnutt. In 1866, shortly after the end of the Civil War, Andrew Chesnutt, who had served in the Union Army, was persuaded by his white father, Wadell Cade, to move his family back to Fayetteville where his son Charles attended Howard School, a segregated school for black children. Robert Harris, that same brilliant brother of Sarah Richardson, who, like the Chesnutts, had also moved back to Fayetteville after the war, served as the first principal of that school. Harris recognized Charles' talents as a student, and, when Charles graduated early from Howard School at the age of 14, Harris recommended him to his younger brother Cicero, a teacher at Peabody School in Charlotte, for an assistant teacher position. After teaching for three years in Charlotte under Cicero Harris' guidance, Charles was called back to Fayetteville in 1875 by Robert Harris to become a teacher at Howard school which had been converted into the State Normal School for training black teachers. The next eight years were busy and significant ones for Charles Chesnutt. In 1877, he married fellow teacher, Susan Yu Perry, and by 1880 the two were parents of daughters Ethel and Helen. In that same year, principal Robert Harris, the man who had had enormous influence on the shaping of Charles Chesnutt, died suddenly. Chesnutt, at age 22, was picked to succeed him as principal of the State Normal School. The job paid well and was prestigious, but Chesnutt soon became dissatisfied with it. As a journal he kept from 1874 to 1882 noted, he had long fantasized of moving back to the North where he believed more opportunities, including the possibility of becoming a writer, awaited him. So, in the spring of 1883, Charles Chesnutt resigned his position as principal of the school in Fayetteville and moved to New York. There he obtained a job as a reporter for Dow, Jones & Co., but, after six months, he decided that Cleveland, where he had been born and had spent his early years, would be a better fit. He moved to Cleveland in the fall of that year, obtaining employment as a clerk in the accounting department of the newly organized Nickel Plate Railroad. The following year, his wife and children (including his son Edwin, born while Chesnutt was away in New York) joined him in Cleveland where they all moved into a rented house on Wilcutt Avenue (today, East 63rd Street) in the Central (today, Fairfax) neighborhood. From 1883 to 1888, the Chesnutts rented several different houses in the Fairfax and Central neighborhoods. Finally, in 1888, they were able to purchase their first house, one that was located on Brenton (East 73rd) Street, just south of Cedar Avenue, an upscale area of the Central neighborhood. In these early years that followied his return to Cleveland, Chesnutt was very busy with new employments, both as a stenographer (for which he had self-trained in North Carolina) and as an attorney — which he began practicing after "reading" the law and receiving the highest test score on the Ohio bar exam in 1887. Still, despite all this, he managed to find time in 1885 to turn his atttention to his dream job and in that year began writing for publication fictional stories about people of color learning how to exercise their rights and live their lives in the Reconstruction South. In December 1885, Charles Chesnutt's first story (as an adult writer) was published. Titled "Uncle Peter's House," it was about a former slave who tried to build a nice house for his family but failed during his lifetime because of the predatory sharecropping system instituted in the South in the post-Civil War period. The story was purchased by the McClure newspaper syndicate and appeared in a number of newspapers in the country, including the Cleveland Herald. Over the next two years, Chesnutt wrote a number of other stories about the post-War South that appeared in various newspapers and magazines. In 1887, his recognition as a writer reached new heights when his story, "The Goophered Grapevine" appeared in the nationally-known Atlantic Monthly. Thereafter, during the years 1887-1900, Chesnutt published forty-seven short stories in the Atlantic and other magazines and newspapers, some of these painting a graphic picture of life for newly freed slaves in the South and others showing how, even in the North, color mattered, albeit in different ways than in the South. In early 1899, two collections of his stories were published as books — one, The Wife of his Youth, consisting of stories about the "color line" in the North, and the other, The Conjure Woman, on stories of life for blacks in the post-war South. After these two books were published, William Dean Howell, an author himself and noted literary critic, praised Chesnutt, adding more glitter to his growing reputation as a great American writer. After the successful debut of his first two books in 1899, Chesnutt sat down with his wife Susan and, after reviewing their family budget, they agreed that he could, for at least a two year period, close his attorney and stenographer offices and devote all of his time to his dream job of becoming a novelist. Over the course of the next two years, he wrote two novels that were published, The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Each treated what was then a very sensitive subject — the first, intermarriage between a white man and a black woman, and the second — inspired by the Wilmington, North Carolina massacre of 1898 — white supremacy and violence against Southern blacks who sought to exercise their rights as citizens. Neither book sold well and both were panned by critics for being too moralistic and by angry white Southerners who claimed they were filled with lies. Chesnutt, after seeing the poor book sales and the negative reviews, decided it was time to step back and reopen his offices as an attorney and stenographer, which he did in the new Williamson Building in downtown Cleveland in early 1902. As noted at the beginning of this story, Charles Chesnutt's novel writing all but came to an end several years later in 1905 with the publishing of The Colonel's Dream. For Chesnutt himself and certainly for his family, it may not have been the worst result because, in addition to allowing him to write what he wanted about the race problem in America, and how he wanted to write it, he also now became free to pursue other important matters of both a personal and professional nature, including becoming a member of and participating in the Rowfant Club's literary work in Cleveland in 1910 (after the Club had rejected his initial membership application on account of his race in 1904); supporting the founding in 1915 of the Playhouse Settlement House, which later was renamed Karamu House; corresponding at length with other black intellectuals; traveling with his family across the United States and around the world; and lecturing, whenever called upon to do so, on the problems of America's "color line," always delivering thoughtful opinions on how it might best be finally erased in this country. And Charles W. Chestnut continued in such activities for the rest of his life. When he died peacefully in his house on November 15, 1932, at the age of 74, his death was front page news for the Plain Dealer. All in all, despite the existence of racism in America and its impact upon him as a biracial man, Charles W. Chesnutt led a very enviable and comfortable life. He owned a grand house in an upscale, integrated neighborhood; he was respected by his peers, both white and black, in Cleveland — something that he had often dreamed about as a young black man growing to adulthood in Fayetteville, North Carolina; and he witnessed all of his children going to college and obtaining the degrees that had been denied to him. (Three of his children attended and graduated from Ivy League schools.) Perhaps then, it would be fair and not inappropriate to say that who suffered most from the premature ending of Chesnutt's career as a novelist was not he but we, the American public, who have been deprived ever since of reading the best novels that he never wrote.

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In 1912, Harriet L. Keeler was chosen as the temporary superintendent of schools for the sixth largest city in the United States. The Cleveland Leader released a feature interview with the recently honored public figure to mark the occassion. The conversation began wth the most pressing of questions: had the unmarried 65 year old ever had a romance in her life? The accomplished author, suffragist, civic activist, social reformer, and retired school teacher offered the politest of responses, "I have lived an intellectual life for my romance, of course having that mother love which is natural to my sex, and which has had its outlet in the love and teaching of children, the love of animals and the love of plants." These outlets of Keeler's intellectual life served her well. Keeler's love of teaching and nature propelled her success as a writer. While Keeler was recognized in Cleveland for a 38-year career in the public schools and as a respected voice in the Progressive Era women's club movement, she was best known as an author in her day. The life-long educator penned a series of seven nature guides between 1894 and her death in 1921. Keeler's writing style was informed by her experience as a teacher and vast knowledge of botany, language, and literature. Her work as a nature writer offers a glimpse into the way privileged women operated within and utilized conservative gender roles to better their own lives and make substantial, lasting contributions to society. The opportunities afforded to Harriet Keeler in pursuing her passions as an author, educator, and amateur botanist inversely grew from a limitation of options available to American women during the 19th century. Born in the mid 1840s, Keeler followed a path taken by many young women with means and access to education during the era — she became a teacher. The job of providing an ethical and moral education to children seemed a natural extension of traditional female responsibilities; this allowed honorable, self-sacrificing women to take hold of an opportunity to be paid horribly as educators. After leaving school at the age of 14, Keeler worked as a teacher in Cherry Hill, New York. Working in schools provided women such as Keeler a temporary, socially accepted reprieve from domestic life and motherhood. It also gave them a chance to expand their education by attending either an Academy School (high school) or a "normal school" designed to train teachers. While the administration of schools remained predominately in the hands of men, the field of teaching became the domain of women. By 1900, 75% of American teachers were female. After a short stint teaching, Harriet Keeler studied at a college preparatory school and proceeded to attend Oberlin College. Keeler's decision to attend Oberlin College in the 1860s set her apart from her female peers; co-educational and women's colleges were scarce, but would grow in popularity toward the end of the century. Graduating with a bachelor of arts from the College Department at Oberlin College, Keeler likely received advanced training in classical languages, literature, and higher mathematics in addition to more common liberal arts studies that centered on education. With few professional job options deemed respectable for women at the time, it is no surprise that upon receiving her degree she accepted employment with a school system. Just as ideas of proper gender roles steered Keeler and other American women towards careers such as teaching, the study of nature had also become an acceptable pursuit for those deemed the fairer sex. Interaction within the tamed outdoors was already understood to be an extension of a woman's domestic life. With popular conceptions of nature morphing in contrast to an urbanizing country during the latter half of the 1800s, what the city lacked in virtue was imbued upon the natural world. The morality of womanhood found company in romantic visions of picturesque rural landscapes. Additionally, a division between "scientific" and "recreational" botany emerged early in the century — the latter being cast from the world of science and left to the musings of writers and women. By the end of the 19th century, women had long been active in the informal study of plants. Botany, with its practical application in preparing home remedies, had been taught to women in order that they could perform domestic duties and educate children. Women played an integral part in the identification and organization of North American plant life, but often in an informal role. By the time of Keeler's first foray into publishing nature writing, a tradition of women botanists preceded her. The opportunities and experiences afforded to Harriet Keeler as a teacher and student converged with the release of her first book on amateur botany in 1894, The Wildflowers of Early Spring. An extensive knowledge of science, Latin terminology, and classical literature, combined with the educator's sensibility for arranging information in a comprehensive and digestible format, can be credited for the popular success of Keeler's writing. Timing also played its part. Not only did her book coincide with the first realized efforts to develop a park system in Cleveland, but the concept of nature was finding new relevance throughout the United States. An increasingly literate female and male population was enamored with birds, flowers, and trees. The 1890s witnessed the beginnings of the nature study movement as well as the blossoming of a nationwide crusade to create idealized, rural-esque park spaces for city dwellers. It was a good time to be a nature writer. In 1893, the first publication of Frances Theodora Parsons' How to Know the Wild Flowers sold out within five days. By the turn of the century, similar "how-to-know" nature guides were commonplace. Within this overcrowded market, Keeler's comprehensive and scientific approach distinguished her writing from the glut of nature writing available to the public. Her 1900 book Native Trees and How to Identify Them became a seminal amateur work on the subject and would be reprinted over a dozen times. Harriet Keeler, in the company of countless other middle- and upper-class American women at the turn of the 20th century, navigated through cultural restrictions using preconceived ideals of womanhood as a springboard for creating professional and personal opportunities. While her work as an author and educator were informed by societal boundaries, these acceptable outlets for Keeler's intellectual life proved frutiful.  Through her chosen vocations, Keeler provided lasting contributions to Cleveland in the social changes she helped push forward, the lives she touched as a teacher, and the legacy of her written word. 

Harriet Keeler's life also inspired a different type of tribute. Following her death in 1921, colleagues and friends — including many prominent Clevelanders — immediatley began work planning a physical memorial to the author, teacher and social advocate. By 1923, three hundred acres of wooded terrain in Brecksville Reservation were dedicated as the Harriet Keeler Memorial Woods. The Cleveland Metropolitan Park Board agreed to preserve the grounds from future development, so that the land would act as a home to the flowers, trees and animals that the prominent Clevelander loved.

Thumbing through the writings of Harriet Keeler, one is reminded of the knowledge and pleasure she has provided to explorers of open fields and forests in Cleveland and throughout the country. Following in this tradition, find a moment to peruse her work and identify a tree or flower when taking your next hike through the Harriet Keeler Memorial Woods in the Brecksville Reservation. Using her words and vast reserves of knowledge as a guide, we are encouraged to discover connections between our natural environment and its underlying world of science, history, and literature.

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The name of Harriett L. Keeler has mingled in the memories of Cleveland park users with impressions of Brecksville Reservation's rugged woodlands and colorful wildflowers. Since the dedication of the Harriet Keeler Memorial Woods over 90 years ago, a shelter house, picnic grounds and nature trails have also shared their identity with the celebrated author and respected educator. Along the Wildflower Loop Trail that meanders through the grounds, a boulder inset with a bronze tablet reminds visitors of the "Teacher – Author – Citizen" in order that she may "liveth in the continuing generation of the woods she loved." The simple text offers a compelling, if vague, portrait of one of Cleveland's most distinguished women at the turn of the 20th century. While the inscription easily conveys to a passerby that Keeler was both revered as a Cleveland teacher and local author of nature guides, what did it mean to be a "citizen" during Keeler's lifetime or at the time of the plaque's dedication in 1936 – and why was this word chosen to honor and encapsulate her legacy for future generations?

To grasp its meaning, we must remember that Ohio women were denied a hallmark of citizenship until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 – just six months before Harriet Keeler's death. For Keeler, women's inability to vote in political elections was symptomatic of the "topsy-turvy" age in which she lived. This turn of phrase offered by Keeler to the Women's Club of Cleveland during a 1913 speech reveals her sense of a society strangely off-axis and marked by poverty, inequality, political corruption and exploitation. Unable to vote and generally excluded from the inner circles of politics and business, middle and upper class women such as Keeler joined together to form clubs, leagues and reform organizations in an effort to improve their lives and recreate the American city. Lacking unity in purpose, but unprecedented in scope, a foundation of grassroots movements emerged in a collective battle against urban disorder. These organizations empowered women to influence American politics and to create professional opportunities for themselves. Harriet Keeler and her peers helped create and was actively involved in what would be called the Progressive Movement. In turn, the topsy-turvy era in which she lived shaped her legacy as a suffragist, social reformer, and leading citizen of Cleveland.

The city Harriet Keeler first encountered when she moved to Cleveland in 1871 to become superintendent of the primary schools was largely unrecognizable by the time of her speech to the Women's Club. Keeler watched as Cleveland's population grew from 93,000 to over 560,000 persons during this time. Glimpses of her prior life growing up on a New York farm, or studying at the rural confines of Oberlin College, surely contrasted with daily visions of city streets teeming with immigrants and streetcars. Year by year, she witnessed the emergence of numerous smokestacks peaking through the city's skyline. As industry flourished, it would have been impossible for Keeler to avoid the physical traces of corporations building a city – not just in the smells and sights of cast-off materials from manufacturing processes, but through her dealings with overcrowded classrooms and parents dependent on their children's labor to survive. During her 38-year career as a teacher and administrator, she experienced the transformation of public schools into replicas of factories that spit students out as quickly as they could arrive. By the mid 1880s, she needed only to glance at a newspaper or to take a short walk beyond downtown for a reminder of the disorder that characterized urban life. The influence of unbridled commercialism, political corruption, and unchecked corporate influence was hammered into the physical landscape of an industrial city.

Despite all the drab characterizations, it was still an age of optimism and hope for middle and upper class residents. Ranked the sixth largest city in the country by the time of her 1913 speech, Cleveland boasted a modern electrical plant, an elaborate park system, municipally owned public transportation, and grandiose plans for a grouping of civic buildings near the historic center of town. Additionally, city life offered a wide range of employment and social opportunities to women. Throughout her time in Cleveland, Keeler was active in women's clubs and civic organizations. Just as teaching was a socially tolerated career for unmarried women, Keeler's participation in these local clubs was a traditional and popular way for women with leisure time to socialize, further their education, and participate in cultural activities. In her late 20s and early 30s, Keeler attended female reading circles and local theater, presented papers to a teacher's club, volunteered on Ladies Committees, and participated in Oberlin College Alumni functions.

On the eve of the Progressive Era, the club movement exploded in popularity; countless American women became involved in civic affairs during these years. Working within their communities, middle and upper class women's groups expanded their activities to reforming social injustices in the industrial city. The influence of men, as found in commercialism and politics, appeared to have created quite the mess of things. With a historic precedent of the female sex being associated with duties of the home, philanthropy, education, culture and religion, these clubs exerted claims of superior morality to justify their intrusion into the male dominated world of politics and civic life. Harriet Keeler's skill as writer offered a unique path into this restricted world. Following the publication and success of her first book on wildflowers in 1893, the author became a public figure. Her work was included in the Women's Press Club exhibition at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. She regularly gave lectures on wildflowers and botany, and was noted as a board or executive member in multiple committees devoted to the cultural advancement of women.

In an 1896 toast given to the local National Collegiate Alumni, Keeler paid tribute to the "new woman" – one of intellect, who was destined to fill a high mission in the world. Through the turn of the century, this mission of the new woman expanded in scope and influence. Women's clubs became better organized and ingrained into the world of politics and reform, quickly progressing to the state and national level, with the goal of instituting reform through legislation and collective action such as boycotts. The concept of fulfilling a high mission in the world was evident in Keeler's civic work. By 1903, Keeler sat on the board of Cleveland's chapter of the National Consumers League, which advocated for fair working conditions as well as ending the exploitation of children and women in the workplace. As the honorary vice president of the local league in 1909, Keeler urged women to write their senators to request the creation of the National Children's Bureau. The Bureau was to gather data on illiteracy, child labor, juvenile courts, crimes against children, orphanages and infant mortality. Probably the loftiest of missions undertaken by Keeler was in her service on the board of the short-lived Cleveland Peace Society - an organization that participated in a national movement to promote peace and end all war.

While Keeler continued to volunteer with reform organizations and publish books on amateur botany, she remained a teacher and administrator with the Cleveland public schools until her retirement in 1908. The author stayed active with the school system even after leaving behind her career responsibilities. Echoing the campaigns of other women's clubs throughout America to improve conditions for both teachers and students, Keeler championed ideas such as reduced class sizes, the hiring of tutors, and providing teachers better pay and more autonomy in their classroom. In a nod to the respect garnered by Keeler from both administrators and teachers, the life-long educator and advocate for school reform was nominated to the position of Superintendent of Schools in 1912 following an unexpected resignation of the post. Initially named an "inspiration candidate" by the school board without her knowledge, Keeler quickly found herself appointed the first woman Superintendent of Schools for the City of Cleveland.

Once having completed this temporary term as Superintendent of Schools, Keeler continued to utilize her privilege and position as a prominent social figure to advocate for social reform. In January 1913, Harriet Keeler was elected president of the Woman Suffrage Party of Cleveland. Largely due to the public successes of the Progressive Era women's club movement, women's suffrage achieved new levels of popular support following the first decade of the 20th century in Cleveland and the United States. Battling against deeply entrenched social norms, however, proved daunting. A state constitutional amendment that would have granted women the vote had failed in 1912. The goal of the Suffrage Party and Harriet Keeler was to gather enough signatures to bring the issue to another vote in 1914. Keeler acted as the spokeswoman of the Suffrage Party, represented the organization at fairs and suffrage parades, circulated petitions, helped organize bi-weekly lectures and mass meetings in the different wards of Cleveland, and spoke to women's clubs throughout the city. Keeler, in ill health, resigned from her position as president in January 1914. Despite the Cleveland branch of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association advising that it was too soon to renew a campaign for amending the Ohio constitution, the referendum was included on the 1914 ballot but failed.

Six years and one global war later, women were granted the right to vote. Harriet Keeler continued to publish nature guides all the while. Within two months of her death in 1921, plans to designate a wooded area of the Brecksville Reservation to Keeler's memory were approved by the Cleveland Metropolitan Park District commissions. Friends and associates of Keeler designed and dedicated a boulder monument by 1925 and financed Brecksville Reservation's first educational nature trail in 1929. Fifteen years following Keeler's death, a new granite boulder and memorial plaque was dedicated to the memory of the distinguished teacher and author. Occurring in the depths of the Great Depression – a time characterized by a resurgence in social reform efforts, as well as the reversal of advances achieved toward gender equality – the choice of the word "citizen" recalls the efforts of women such as Harriet Keeler who helped reshape American politics, society and the urban landscape during the Progressive Era.

Obscured by time, this fitting tribute has met with the same fate as all lasting memorials; as years passed and personal remembrances faded, new generations of park patrons were offered the opportunity to inscribe their own meaning and memories to the grounds' namesake. Only in this way can Harriet Keeler live on "in the continuing generation of the woods that she loved."

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