Leonora: The Real Christy

By Hannah Zellers

The Honda bounced over patches of concrete and gravel. With each curve in the road, my stomach twisted a little tighter. I tried to ignore the motion sickness and watch for a road sign to the Christy Mission. My dad and I were on a Sunday afternoon drive to hunt down some local history. Even as a Cocke County native, I had forgotten how deep these mountains went. The one-lane road wound through hollows that wouldn’t see sunlight until late afternoon. Old tobacco barns sat in tree-lined clearings, slanting precariously above the vehicles and farm implements stored inside. Dogs barked from the front porch welcome mats of houses tucked between hillsides. I didn’t see the Christy Mission sign until it appeared in the rearview mirror. A little reverse work and one sharp turn later, we were back on track, angling upward and trading the patched concrete for gravel. I wondered what these woods had looked like to Leonora Whitaker, the real-life schoolteacher who inspired the bestselling novel, “Christy”, by Catherine Marshall. Telling the story of a nineteenyear-old from Asheville, North Carolina, the book follows Christy into the mountains of East Tennessee. Though the novel is fictionalized, an estimated three-fourths is based on fact drawn from the life of Leanora. Arriving shortly after Christmas 1909, Leonora stepped off the train at the Del Rio train stop and spent the night at the boarding house owned by Joseph and Mildred Burnett. After a journey through the snow to Ebenezer Mission, she began teaching school in the little community that the novel fictionally refers to as Cutter Gap. The novel creates a love-triangle between Christy, Rev. David Grantland, and Dr. Neil MacNeill—but the doctor’s character was added for fictional appeal. In reality, a love story did occur between the mission pastor named John Wood and Leanora, the new schoolteacher. The two were married four months after they first met. What was this Leonora like—the real Christy? I wondered. Had she really been the city-girl with the fine clothes depicted in the 1994 “Christy” film starring Kellie Martin? It seemed that only a girl with

Cocke County Department of Tourist Development This is one of the many signs that provides information to travelers as they visit Chapel Hollow Road in Del Rio. This is the site of the fictional village Cutter Gap, used in the novel “Christy”, which was based on the life of Leonora Whitaker.

courage and grit would hike seven miles through snow to an isolated cove in the mountains to live among strangers in order to teach children how to read. As we drove, I tried to imagine making the trek on foot, or, worse, in a horse-drawn wagon on roads with holes so deep that wagons were trapped up to their axels in mud. The gravel roads under our tires seemed luxurious compared to the novel’s description of the mudhole where “mules might just as well be trying to hoof it through sorghum.” After enough twists and curves to make me question the existence of Christy’s mountain home, the woods on both sides of the road fell away to reveal a narrow valley ahead, a true mountain “holler” if ever I’d see one. Kudzu grew on the steep slopes. A sign with peeling paint and moss growing on the edges said “Christy” in black letters chipped by time and weather. Another sign beneath it read “INFORMATION” in block letters next to an empty brochure box. Further up the valley, a rusted car with wingtips sank up to its hubcaps in soft, spring earth. It had arrived sometime in the interim between Leanora’s arrival and my own and had apparently decided to put down roots. Little plots cleared from the surrounding woods were empty except for signs staked into the ground.

From page 16 One sign beside a trickle of water and a pile of stones read “Spring.” Another read, “Church-Schoolhouse,” and yet another, located beside a stonework foundation in the ground, said, “Mission House Site.” Little else was left. I couldn’t help feeling disappointed that a century would leave so few relics. Other than the signs sticking up from the ground, this hollow looked like a hundred others that we’d passed on the road. I trudged up it until I saw a crumbling chimney

Emma Woods Hoskins Collection This is a photo taken of Leonora Whitaker at the Christy Mission compound. Whitaker’s daughter, Catherine Marshall, based the novel “Christy” on the her mother’s time teaching impoverished children in the mountains of Appalachia. Whitaker left her home to teach at the mission school near Del Rio in 1909.

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Emma Woods Hoskins Collection Ebenezer Mission also served as a school for many years including the time in which Leonora Whitaker was a teacher from 1909 to 1912. The church was eventually dismantled and reconstructed on its current site. It is now know as Ebenezer Independent Missionary Baptist Church. sticking up from the ground like a tall game of Jenga. An outline of a stone foundation showed where the outer walls of a cabin had once stood. All of the buildings were long gone—burnt, fallen down, or relocated. Leonora, too, was gone from this cove deep in the mountains. The place was silent except for the sound of a creek and the wind and a dog barking somewhere down the valley. What had I expected to find? A few cabins? A springhouse? Maybe a fence row? I didn’t know. Maybe I had hoped to find something that would make the real Christy seem more…real. As I walked back toward the parked Honda, I listened to the sound of the creek. In the novel, when Christy arrives at the mission house, she hears, “the sound of a mountain stream somewhere close.” Leonora had heard that same stream, just as I was hearing it now. I saw Grape Hyacinth growing in clusters at the edge of the woods. Perhaps Leonora had gathered wildflowers in the springtime of 1910. She had gone to get water from the spring. She had attended church and visited with neighbors. As I thought about these everyday actions, I could imagine Leonora as a person, not just a character living in the pages of a book. Even though she inspired a book that outlasts wood beams and stone fireplaces, the real Christy was an ordinary person like me. I looked around once more. The buildings at the mission site were gone now, but the story of a woman who ventured into an unknown place in order to serve others remained. That story became a bestseller because it was based on an ordinary woman who had courage. And that courage is what made Leonora Whitaker, the real Christy, extraordinary.

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