Margaret Patten Smith
photo by John Shearer
Bright School recently held its second annual Founders Day luncheon – a fledgling event designed to help connect alumni even more with this independent school that recently reached the century mark.
While the focus of the luncheon was to honor the contributions of those who have aided or inspired the school in the more recent past and present, one person in attendance had a direct connection to the school’s distant past.
Margaret Patten Smith, who was among the small number of school patrons gathered in the Chattanooga Golf and Country Club’s ballroom, is the daughter of the late George Holmes Patten, Bright’s original benefactor.
This man who was a success in the adult world of business also aided children by helping to ensure that the elementary school would continue to prosper through a nice new school building.
“He was chairman of the board and raised the money and was best friends with Ms.
Bright,” Ms. Smith said. “He really said he (built) it for his children because he didn’t know of any other good schools around.”
Bright had been founded in 1913 by former public schoolteacher Mary Gardner Bright, and for the first decade or so was located in about four former residences alongside McCallie Avenue.
However, Mr. Patten’s oldest daughter, Anne-Elizabeth Patten Pettway, had begun attending the school during that time. And that is apparently what inspired him in 1923 to tell Ms. Bright he would help build a school building and provide better facilities for this school that was not any older than its students.
What resulted was an R.H. Hunt-designed school building on Fortwood Street near the current UT-Chattanooga campus that served the school adequately from 1924 until the move to its current, more-spacious campus in Riverview in 1963.
While it was quite an ambitious project building this structure that lasted until UTC tore it down in the 1990s, Bright School was certainly not his only contribution to Chattanooga.
Born in Illinois in 1876 as the youngest son of Civil War veteran George Washington Patten, he and his family later moved to Chattanooga, where he graduated from Chattanooga High School in its early years.
He later received an advanced college degree from a school in Illinois that became part of Northwestern University. Mechanically inclined, he joined General Electric Co. in New York after military service in the Spanish-American War.
He was involved with both the Paris Exposition of 1900 and the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 as the official in charge of the lighting displays. He would also brighten Chattanooga in a different kind of way through his civic leadership in the coming years.
In 1912, he married Margaret Thomas of West Virginia, who was 15 years his junior and whom he had met at a Chattanooga wedding. A Sweetbriar College graduate, her family had been in the coal mining business, and he was involved in that as well as his family’s Chattanooga Medicine Co. and some other businesses, including banking.
Some were not as successful as others, so the faithful member of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church also learned business lessons about adversity.
The same was true with his family life. He and his family had six children, two of whom died tragically of diseases before they reached the age of 16.
Ms. Smith was born when Mr. Patten was in his mid-50s. By then, the family had been living for nearly 15 years in a spacious white home at 1607 Edgewood Circle in Riverview, a home that was destroyed by fire in 2011.
Among his civic projects in Chattanooga were heading loan drives related to World Wars I and II. He was described as being able to get along with everybody, from the rich to the poor, and from free enterprise-focused businessmen to labor union members.
After he helped Bright School build a new building, he stayed on as the president of the board of trustees. Ms. Smith – the wife of the late Millers department store executive and commercial realty broker Blackwell Smith Jr. – remembered that her father always handed out diplomas every year at the sixth-grade graduation.
The 1944 Bright graduate said she also recently learned from longtime Kenco Group executive and fellow Bright alum Jim Kennedy that her father also took the Bright sixth-grade class to the opening day of the Lookouts’ game every year in the 1930s.
The Patten family love for Bright School was passed down to Ms. Smith, as she recalled that she enjoyed greatly her time there. That included the art classes under Frank Baisden, a “real character” who lived on the backside of Lookout Mountain and taught such skills as making items out of copper.
She also enjoyed music class there and learning to play different instruments.
“Those were my happiest days, those at Bright School,” she said. “I was just always happy there. I just wish every child could learn what we learned there.”
Regarding school head Ms. Bright, Ms. Smith recalled that she was gentle and soft-spoken, but also had a firm manner about her.
Ms. Smith later worked at Bright briefly assisting a kindergarten teacher – a Ms. Orgain – and remembers having to let Ms. Bright know when she was late. The Lookout Mountain resident also served on the school’s board of trustees for six years.
By then, her father had been deceased for a number of years. While he had the heart emotionally for civic projects like Bright School, he did not physically, and he died of an apparent heart attack at his home early on the morning of Nov. 21, 1942. He was only 66 and was also involved at the time with Chattanooga Stamping and Enameling Co., which made materials for the war effort.
The city mourned his passing, and Ms. Smith said that some firemen at a local fire hall pulled their fire engines out in salute as his funeral procession passed. Mayor Ed Bass also closed city of Chattanooga offices during his funeral hour.
Mr. Patten, who was considered great at raising money and also helped the University of Chattanooga, is now long gone. But his legacy remains in part in the still-operating school he helped bring into maturity.
“He would be so proud of the school with all the new things,” Ms. Smith said.
To hear an audio interview with Ms. Smith regarding her father, click
here.
Jcshearer2@comcast.net