I guess that I knew Zella Armstrong from the day I was born until she died. I have read almost everything she wrote.
My grandfather was the emcee of the Cotton Ball until he died. I was a printer’s devil at the Hamilton County Herald, and she would walk into there virtually two days a week.
She was always walking and I wonder if she ever took a bus. It is a long walk from where she lived to Patten Parkway.
She wrote one book that teed quite a few people in Chattanooga. I mentioned it to Lee Anderson at the Free Press and he went ballistic. I found the book very interesting. The title was WHO DISCOVERED AMERICA - THE AMAZING STORY OF MADOC. It is not long, well illustrated, and if you knew how she did her research you would be amazed.
There were no fax machines, no emails, and the librarians in Wales - that is where Madoc came from - sent her data from Wales via the mail. I will not go into the specifics of the book, but she said that Madoc and his people built the stone structure at Fort Mountain.
A Chattanooga dentist from Lookout Mountain paid the Peabody Museum at Harvard to get that blanketty Welshman off of Fort Mountain. He got what he paid for from Peabody. But they did nothing to discover the origins of the structure at Fort Mountain.
If I am not wrong, it was Zella who said of "the Confederate fifle pits" on Lookout that the soldiers had nothing to do with that wall, but they were glad the wall was there. With some archaeological experience under my belt, I was asked by the Atlanta Constitution to go with a reporter and write a story about who I thought built it. I did a bit more research on the stone work there, more than Peabody did, and my assessment is that it is nothing more than an effigy monument. Georgia is protective about known effigy monuments in Georgia. I know that there are at least five and I am not sure that Fort Mountain is one of them, but the most famous is Rock Eagle which is below Eaton, Ga., which if you travel old highways, you might find it. There are several stone walls flooded over by Chickamauga Lake and I understand that there was one where the Hamilton County Courthouse is.
Zella had her own publishing house, it was Lookout Publishing, and the run on the Madoc book was rather small. This was all in her abode and it flooded and about half were destroyed. So there are not many out there. I have two, one was Gilbert Govan’s copy and another was bought from a used book seller.
Since there are not many copies around, say 100-200, I found a book that was heavily plagiarized that had a strong distribution. Having been in Publishing in New York City, I knew how to kill the book, so I xeroxed parts of both of them and the book was taken out of circulation.
As for studying history, I have 55 semester hours in history from the university I attended. Over the years I have read over a thousand history books on both U.S. and European history. My wife wanted them out of the house and I gave 850 or so to Tuskegee University. Why there? Tuskegee’s library is underfunded and I contributed them because the better part of them are now in the stacks. I have about 600 more to give them.
I do not read novels, I only read non fiction and 90 percent of them are on history. Peabody, having done virtually nothing to ascertain who built it and I, however, came to the same conclusion and that was that it was built by what is called “the Woodland Indians of their time.
On Chattanooga and Tennessee history, you will find Dr. Livinggood’s books incredible. He and I were friends for a long time. He was a professor of history at UC and UTC.
However, I do not think I would ever forget Zella, walking down Patten Parkway wearing her one size too small shoes (it seemed) that gave her a Minnie Mouse look.
Raleigh C. Perry
Buford, GA