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A photo of Glenn's father, Glenn F. Chesnut, Sr., wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, taken around 1948, when he was Art Director of the Sunday Magazine section of the San Antonio Express newspaper.
He eventually ended up as Chairman of the Art Department at Middle Georgia College, in Cochran, Georgia, where he built a house on a slope looking out over a grove of pine trees and spent the rest of his life teaching students and painting. |
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Glenn's mother, Glynn Hind Chesnut, when she was a young woman. A pencil sketch made by Glenn's father in the late 1920's or early 1930's.
Glynn spent her early childhood in Oxford, Georgia (now a suburb of Atlanta), and then when she was around twelve or thirteen, moved to Winchester, Kentucky (in the heart of the bluegrass region) when her father took a teaching post at Kentucky Wesleyan College. After Glynn's father lost his teaching post when the college ran out of money during the great depression, Glynn's mother took a position as dorm mother at Union College in Barbourville, Kentucky, which allowed Glynn to finish her college degree in English (and meet her future husband Glenn Sr., who was doing a degree in English literature there also). |
| One of Glenn's baby pictures |
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Glenn and his father outside their house in Springfield, Ohio. Until Glenn Jr. came along, Glenn Sr. had been teaching in an art school in Louisville, Kentucky. He and Glynn had been living in a tiny apartment with an ice box for a refrigerator. Glenn Sr. decided that he had to obtain a better paying job, and finally found one making color printing plates for the Crowell-Collier publishing company in Springfield. This was the printing plant that produced Collier's magazine and other prominent high quality magazines, along with some lighter weight literature like the Captain Marvel comic books.
He managed to get a job at the Standard Gravure Publishing Company (again making color printing plates) and move back to Louisville when Glenn Jr. was only three and a half years old. So Glenn Jr. has only two or three sketchy memories from the period he was living in Springfield. Springfield is a pleasant and prosperous town of 70,500 in southwestern Ohio, about sixty miles northeast of the large city of Cincinnati (the old Ohio riverboat city). It is a little smaller than South Bend, Indiana, but the feel is quite similar: nice houses, lots of beautiful trees and lawns, and a small downtown area with big buildings. |
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Glenn being held by his grandparents, Alfred Thomas Hind and Bird Almand Hind.
His Grandfather Hind had taught history and bible at Kentucky Wesleyan College (then located in Winchester in the bluegrass region of Kentucky, where the famous race horses are raised), but lost his post there in the great depression when the college ran out of money. He eventually began pastoring Methodist churches in small towns in north Georgia (like Hartwell, Livonia, and Elberton), which he continued doing until his retirement, when he built his own home in Elberton, and raised raspberries and exotic house plants for a hobby. He also wrote poetry. He had worked as a carpenter to earn his way through seminary at Garrett in Chicago and Vanderbilt in Nashville (these two institutions, along with Boston School of Theology, were the great Methodist seminaries of that era). Garrett (like Boston School of Theology) was a major center of classical Protestant liberalism, so he was trained in the thought of the German theologians Ritschl and Harnack, and the spirituality of the Yale-trained New England Congregationalist theologian Horace Bushnell ("a Christian child should be brought up in such a way as never ever to doubt the love of God"). Glenn's Grandmother Hind had been the child of an extremely wealthy plantation owner from the part of Georgia just north of Atlanta, and had been born only ten years after the end of the War between the States, when a good deal of the old plantation life still continued to exist. |
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Glenn with his Grandfather John Jacob Chesnut and his Grandmother Tabitha Humfleet Chesnut, and their dog Joe, a border collie mix.
J.J. and Tabitha started out in a two-room log cabin deep in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, where they had seven sons and three daughters (one of whom, Helen, died as a child from what they called "milk fever"). Many years later they moved to a small hill farm with a white frame house just outside of Barbourville, Kentucky, where this photograph is taken. The only time Glenn visited the original home place when he was a child -- the old isolated place in the hills when his father and uncles and aunts had been born and raised -- the log cabin and the huge log barn had mostly tumbled down into ruins. It was so far back in the hills that automobiles could only go part of the way. Everyone had to get out and walk the last mile or so of the narrow dirt road on foot. J.J. did not know how to read and write until his wife Tabitha taught him how, but all except one of their sons and daughters earned college degrees. Two of their sons (Glenn and John Jr.) became college professors and there were others (like Dan and Aubrey) who taught high school. |
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Glenn with his Grandfather Chesnut, on his grandfather's little farm in the hills just outside of Barbourville, Kentucky, with Joe, the border collie mix. When you took Joe into a cow pasture, he would instinctively start herding the cattle.
By the way, the camera was level, the hillside where the houe was built really was that steep. |
Glenn on his grandfather's farm, riding on the back of a large draft mule. As a sideline business, his grandfather bought them as colts and trained them to harness. That is probably his Aunt Cleo (wife of his Uncle Dan Chesnut) holding him on the mule's back.
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