Georgia Cottage: The House Where Augusta Evans Wilson Wrote Her Way to Fame
Near Mobile, Alabama
At the end of a long avenue of live oak trees in Mobile, Alabama, there is a house that has been standing since eighteen forty. Colonel John Murrell built it for his daughter, fashioning a one-story wood-frame structure with a deep porch supported by six Tuscan columns, a hipped roof, and matching side wings that give it a formal symmetry. The style is a blend of Creole cottage and Greek Revival, a combination that captures Mobile's architectural identity perfectly, caught between the French colonial past and the antebellum American present.
The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-two, but its real historical claim rests on what happened inside it between eighteen fifty-seven and eighteen sixty-eight. During those eleven years, a woman named Augusta Jane Evans lived here, and she became one of the most widely read authors in the United States.
Evans wrote three novels in this house. The first, Macaria, published in eighteen sixty-four during the Civil War, was so popular with Confederate soldiers that Union commanders reportedly ordered it seized from their camps. The second, Saint Elmo, published in eighteen sixty-six, became a national sensation, one of the best-selling American novels of the nineteenth century. Towns, hotels, a river steamboat, and countless babies born in the years following its publication were named after its romantic hero.
When Augusta Evans Wilson married Lorenzo Madison Wilson in eighteen sixty-eight, she left Georgia Cottage. But she had already made history. She was the first female author in the United States to earn more than one hundred thousand dollars for her writing, a milestone that acknowledged what readers already knew: she had given them a world.
The oak avenue still leads to the house. The trees were planted before eighteen forty.
