Johnson Interview

History of the Telfair Must Wait

by Jane Fishman, Savannah Morning News
photo by Bob Morris, Savannah Morning News

A funny thing happened to Charles Johnson on his way to writing a history of the Telfair Museum of Art. He fell in love. With Mary Telfair.
   So instead of dutifully recording the comings and goings of Savannah's only art museum—absolutely a book in itself, especially if it included the hoops the current board had to jump through to gain approval for the new wing and the personalities holding the hoops—Johnson took another turn.
   He focused on Mary, whose family name and money financed so much in Savannah, including the mu-seum, which was her family residence.
   But Johnson didn't just plumb the usual places. Johnson, a lawyer by training, is a digger and a seeker. And he's curious. He was determined to "breathe the same air" that Mary woke up to.
   He's also patient. When someone who read his first draft suggested the book needed more details about what the 19th century was like for women he took a class at Armstrong Atlantic State University.
   His new book, "Mary Telfair, the Life and Legacy of a Nineteenth-Century Woman," is due out next week. Savannah's Frederic Beil is the publisher.
   In between travels Johnson spent months camped out at the Georgia Historical Society, which was named for Mary's brother-in-law, William Hodgson. On his way into town from his home at the Landings, Johnson, 70, would stop at Hunter Horn for a ham sandwich, then take lunch breaks in Forsyth Park.
   With 19 boxes of Telfair papers at the historical society, there was plenty to consider. He saw and felt Mary's worn passport, creased and folded from all her travels; a little pocket notebook of daily observations kept by Hodgson; and dozens of personal letters.
   Then he hit the road.
   He visited two former Telfair plantations. The one on Telfair Road, Sabine Fields, is now occupied by the Amtrak station. The other, on Louisville Road in Bloomingdale, is home to Sharon Gardens.
   He went to Burke County, where her father was the largest single landowner, and visited the locales of two large Telfair plantations, now home to a nuclear power plant. He traveled to the site of a defunct sawmill in Telfairville, now a place in name only with an intersection and a convenience store.
   In London, he toured St. George's, on Hanover Square, the site of her sister Margaret's 1842 marriage to Hodgson. Still not satisfied, Johnson ploughed through the archives in Westminster to find out names of witnesses to the wedding.
   He visited collections in Atlanta and Duke University to read correspondence between Mary and friends.
   Finally, he went to the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., to read the testimony and narrative behind the objections to Mary's will.
   Then, to do justice to his subject, who, like many women of her time, was a avid reader, he spent months catching up on classical and literary allusions.
   None of this, Johnson claims, differed all that much from the 32 years he spent in corporate law, working mainly for Merrill Lynch.
   "As a lawyer, I'd gather facts, analyze them and present them," he said. "Law is problem solving, getting deals done, so I was used to deadlines. I knew I could finish this. But I prefer a conversational style. I hate using big words. Like 'paradigm.' That is my least-favorite word."
   His decision to retire at age 56 was the easiest thing he ever did. "Then again, I always was a good vacation-taker," he said.
   In 1988, when he left his office at the World Trade Center, he already had written one book, an 800-page tome about corporate finance and securities laws, and soon turned to crafting a memoir about his life at his firm. When he got to Savannah, John Luck, who just passed away, talked Johnson into writing about the Telfair.
   "Before I moved here I never heard of Mary Telfair," Johnson said. "But she was a fascinating woman who did not accept the norm," Johnson said.
   "She worked very hard within the system to find her identify. My real hope right now is to see the book turned into a movie. I'm thinking Judi Dench would play a great Mary."