The belle and the bold.

Born into the wealthy and politically connected Walthall family, Kate Freeman Clark seemed destined for the typical life of the Southern belle, but her passion and talent led her to take up a life of painting in New York City, albeit with her mother and often her grandmother in tow as her chaperones. As a well-regarded protégé of noted American portraitist William Merrit Chase, Clark created more than 1,000 delicate and sophisticated still lifes and portraits, and saw her paintings recognized and exhibited in prestigious venues while she was still a young woman.

However, when her mother, grandmother and mentor all passed away within a span of a few years, Clark put all of her works into New York City storage, retreated to Holly Springs to the guise of mild-mannered spinster, and against the protests of her New York friends, never painted again. It would be decades before the residents of Holly Springs would even learn of Clark’s luminous talent, thanks to a surprising bequest in her will, for her very own museum to display her works.

That kind of conflicted modesty would have been inconceivable to Colonel William C. Falkner, lawyer, planter, politician and best-selling novelist whose White Rose of Memphis helped finance Falkner’s other creation, the Ripley Railroad. The plotline of White Rose, a murder mystery set on the steamboat of that same name, could hardly rival the drama of the real life of the Colonel, who fought in two wars, who gained and lost his Civil War command through his hard-charging leadership, who claimed to have killed two men in self defense, and whose own life ended when he was gunned down on the street by his former business partner.

Falkner’s life and fiction might have become the stuff of merely local lore had it not been for a highly select audience of one, a grandson born seven years after the Colonel’s death, a child who would eventually become one of the world’s greatest novelists.