My
name in Mary Malinda and I live in a bookstore.
It is not your ordinary bookstore and I am not you usual bookstore
resident. You see, Horton’s Books &
Gifts is the oldest bookstore in Georgia and
-- and well, I’m a ghost.
I
had always been a reader and I loved books.
My uncle was the founder of Bowdon College, where I attended and
graduated as the first female (co-ed) in 1874 with a degree in teaching. I moved to Griffin, Georgia, where I taught
school for several years before I met my wonderful husband, Newton Allen
Horton. After we married, we lived in
the even smaller town of Hiram, until I
returned home to give birth to my daughter.
Things did no go well and I did not survive. My poor daughter, Mary N., died a month later. We are both buried in the Methodist
Protestant Cemetery located on the old Bowdon College campus.
You may ask why I now live at the bookstore founded after my
death – well, I always loved to read and to teach, so helping students find the
books for class was just a natural. On
a trip back to Carrollton, N. A. met the lovely Viney Lassetter whom he married
soon afterwards. They had two sons, William born in 1892 and Hewling (Hap) born
in 1894.
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| Ad from the Carroll Free Press, April 1892 |
Although he was still an undertaker, N. A. decided to set up a small section of
the furniture and undertaking store where he worked as a place to sell schools
books to the students attending the recently organized Carrollton City
Schools. In those days, the students had
to pay tuition and also purchase their own books. By today’s standards, the books did not cost
very much, but at the time the books
were very dear, so only those families who could afford the tuition and books
would send their children to school.
Many students had to work on the family farm or in the family business,
so attending school was not an option for them.
When a child came into the store, I would try to help them read by
whispering the correct words in his/her ear.
Helping with arithmetic and algebra was a little more difficult, but I
helped children think through problems to solve them. Books for each class were separated into
stacks with a total price for the stack hand written on a note.
