COVER STORY
Pulitzer Prize Nominee Has Won All The Hearts Of Chattanooga Walker’s lifetime achievements on and around Audubon Acres
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OBERT SPARKS WALKER IS PERHAPS BEST KNOWN AS the founder of the Chattanooga Audubon Society. His significance to conservation efforts led the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation to name their Lifetime Achievement Award the Robert Sparks Walker Award. By Ray Zimmerman Pulse contributor
A few people are still alive who remember participating in his nature walks and learning about birds, flowers, and trees under his instruction. His literary achievements are perhaps the least well known of his accomplishments. He began writing freelance articles while still in high school. He went on to have one of his books nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. At age 22, he acquired fifty percent ownership of the
Southern Fruit Grower magazine. He served as editor and publisher of that magazine from 1900 until its sale in 1921. He later served as Nature Editor of Flower Grower magazine. Walker had a weekly nature column in the Chattanooga Times beginning in 1933. The Chattanooga Audubon Society has a partial collection of these articles titled “Nature Answers: 1940 to 1950”. The copy is available for viewing, with permission, at the Audubon Acres property. Though only two of Walkers books remain in print, copies of many
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more are preserved in the Local History Department of the Chattanooga Public Library. A search via the web page worldcat.org revealed copies of Walker’s writings available at libraries nationwide, including The Library of Congress, the Tennessee State Library and Archives, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga library. Walker’s first published book, “Anchor Poems”, appeared in 1925, followed by a second book of verse, “My Fathers Farm”, in 1927. By extolling the rural life, Walker found his audience and his audience loved his work. On a visit to the Boston public library, he learned that “My Father’s Farm” was so popular they kept it on closed reserve, only available for reading on the premises. He related that story in his later book, “As the Indians Left It”. The poems speak of cowbells and mockingbirds with a clover covered
hillside at the center of one poem. “The Coming of the Snows” presents a world transformed. His love of the land appears to have been boundless. In the final poem, “The Farm Incarnated” he describes himself as not a resident of the farm but as one infused with its very essence. It ends with these two lines: I am the incarnation here, Of father’s farm I loved so dear! Walker was also active in bird conservation. In 1930, Wyman Reed Green published, “The Banding of Chimney Swifts in Chattanooga” with Robert Sparks Walker listed in card catalogs as an “other author”. This article appeared in a journal titled Bird Banding, July 1930, Volume I. The Chattanooga Public Library has a bound offprint of the article which includes a photo of Walker placing a band on a swift. Walker had a growing reputation as an author and editor when, at age 53, he published “Torchlights to the Cherokees” (Macmillan, 1931). He spent several weeks examining relevant materials in the files of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library to complete it. The Pulitzer Prize nomination for that book accelerated his career, though he did not win the award which went to General Pershing’s memoirs. In this book he described the Brainerd mission, named for David Brainerd, a missionary to the Leni Lenape Indians. All that remains of that mission today is a cemetery near Eastgate
