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Welty House Gets Little Free Library
Belhaven’s inaugural Little Free Library is now in place in the Eudora Welty Education and Visitor Center’s front yard on Pinehurst Street. Little Free Libraries are hand-crafted structures that contain a changing collection of books donated and shared by people of all ages and backgrounds.
The Tudor-style box echoes the architecture of Eudora Welty’s house and can hold more than twenty books. In the spirit of Welty’s love of reading, the library is available to anyone willing to share a book.
“The Little Free Library is a nationwide movement that encourages reading,” said Chase Wynn, education outreach specialist at the Eudora Welty House and Garden. “I feel certain Miss Welty would have liked that.”
Two other Little Free Libraries are located in Jackson neighborhood Fondren. The Little Free Library’s mission is to promote a sense of community, reading for children, literacy for adults, and libraries around the world.
Belhaven neighborhood architect Arthur Jones designed the structure and Jeff Becker of Quality Carpentry built it. The library was sponsored by the Belhaven Improvement Association.
The Eudora Welty House and Garden (EWHG) is celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the historic garden’s opening in March. Mississippi native, writer, and humorist Julia Reed will be the guest J? speaker at a special garden luncheon on March 27 at the Mississippi Museum of Art.
Night blooming cereuses and camellias propagated from Welty’s own plants will be available for sale. Proceeds will benefit the continuing
restoration of the garden. Luncheon tickets may be purchased for $60 each by sending a check payable to the Eudora Welty Foundation at P.O. Box 55685 Jackson,
MS 39296-5685. For more information, call 601-353-7762 or email foundation@ eudorawelty.org.
The EWHG will host its annual spring plant sale on Saturday, March 29, beginning at 10 a.m. and running until the plants are sold out. The sale will feature varieties of camellias found in the garden such as “White Empress” and “Pink
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In the early 1990s Susan Haltom began using the Eudora Welty Collection at MDAH to plan the restoration of the almost-one-acre garden to its original 1925
design. The collection contains extensive documentation of the garden kept by Welty and her mother, Chestina, including garden diaries and journals, photographs of the garden, and voluminous letters mentioning the garden and its importance in the fiction Welty produced.
“The garden is always changing,” said Haltom, co-author of One Writer s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place. “How do you decide what to keep and what to change? Preserving it requires a long-term plan so that it will go on even after we’re gone.”
To that end, faculty members of Mississippi State University’s Department of Landscape Architecture have been working with the Eudora Welty House and Garden staff, Haltom, and garden volunteers to develop a landscape management plan that will help secure the garden as an important site of national culture and history.
“Things are looking great for the future of the garden,” said Bridget Edwards, Welty House director. “In addition to the long-range management plan, we’re about to install new garden signs that will better meld the Welty House, the grounds that surround it, and the labors, aspirations, and inspirations that permeated both. Also, three new raised beds behind the Education and Visitors Center will be used for plant propagation and educational programming.”


Mississippi History Newsletter 2014 Spring (6)
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