The Belles’ toll.

She might have been Scarlet O’Hara. Her father was an Irish immigrant who married into a wealthy plantation family that fell on hard times after the Civil War. But when Katherine Sherwood Bonner McDowell found herself in a stifling marriage, starved for emotional and financial support, she didn’t bother with the draperies. Instead she filed for divorce, settled her only child with family and headed for Boston to make her mark as a writer. That she did is evidence not only of her talent but of her determination as well. Longfellow became her patron and colleague; her stories achieved national acclaim, published under the pseudonym of Sherwood Bonner.

But her success was short-lived. In 1878, her brother fell ill with yellow fever, as did her father (who had cut off contact with her during her divorce). Once the rebel, now the dutiful daughter, Bonner came home to Holly Springs to nurse them. It was here only a few years later that she would be diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. Today you can learn more about Bonner at Cedarhurst, the Bonner family home.

Like Bonner, Kate Freeman Clark was born to a preeminent Southern family, the wealthy and politically connected Walthalls. In her early years, Clark seemed the perfect Southern belle, interested in beaus, fearful of becoming a spinster. But it was art that truly stirred her passion, and eventually she took up residence in New York City, where accompanied by her mother (and her grandmother at times) she became an active art student and a respected protégé of noted American painter and portraitist William Merritt Chase.

But Clark’s will to create was dealt a fatal blow with her mother’s and grandmother’s deaths, both of which followed on the heels of the death of her patron. Leaving her paintings in storage in New York City, she moved back to the family home in Holly Springs, and against the advice of her New York friends who urged her to “leave thing unembroidered,” she abandoned painting all together and took up the persona of small-town spinster. It was only after her death two decades later that a bequest in her will created her final work: the Kate Freeman Clark Gallery, which has allowed her paintings to be shared with the world once again. The portraits and still lifes that hang at the Gallery are remarkable.

Remarkable, too, is the story of another young woman who challenged the barriers of society and overcame even greater odds. She was born a slave, she lived a hero, and today her portrait hangs next to Winston Churchill’s in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Her name was Ida B. Wells, and her story began here in Holly Springs.