Emma Bell Miles Collection

Emma Bell Miles’s parents were both teachers and both graduates of the Evansville Normal School. The family moved to Walden Ridge, Tennessee in 1890 for health reasons and to establish a school for mountain children as a mission of the Presbyterian Church. In 1892, Martha Ann Bell, née Mirick, purchased 2.46 acres of land near the top of the W Road for construction of the family home in which Emma lived as a girl, then, briefly, after her marriage to Frank Miles. Emma spent the winters and springs of 1900 and 1901 at the Saint Louis School of Art with the assistance of her teacher Zerelda Rains and family friends, a period Emma Bell and Frank Miles considered their engagement.That the Bells did not approve of Emma’s blossoming relationship with Frank Miles may be read between the lines of their 1901 correspondence. In Summer 1901 when Emma returned from St. Louis, the Bells were living on the Georgia end of Missionary Ridge and struggling to support themselves in a rural region in which opportunities for formal schooling were only then becoming organized. Martha Ann Bell died October 3, 1901, and Emma Bell and Frank Miles married on October 30, 1901.

Emma Bell and Frank Miles struggled financially, and Emma sold her poetry, short stories, and books, The Spirit of the Mountains, to make ends meets. She also made money selling her art, some of which is featured in this digital collection. Emma and Frank had a difficult marriage, and their children often went hungry. This life of continual poverty eroded Emma Bell Miles's health and after spending several years in the Pine Breeze Sanitarium in Chattanooga, she died in a small house Frank had rented in what is now North Chattanooga, in 1919

- From University of Tennessee at Chattanoga, https://digital-collections.library.utc.edu/digital/collection/p16877coll6