Babies can be stubborn. They alone determine when the blessed event will occur. And more often than not, they pick the worst possible time for it.
Such was the case with one baby’s arrival 140 years ago. This bundle of joy showed up on a battlefield. And it made an entire army change its plans. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The eyes of the nation were focused throughout the long, scorching summer of 1864 on Atlanta. Known at the time as the Gateway to the South, it was, in fact, much more than that.
The War Between the States had been raging with a ferocity never before seen. Now, three blood-soaked years later, both armies were locked in a death grip at Atlanta. And everything was riding on the outcome.
For the South, losing its major manufacturing and transportation hub would be a blow that it could never recover from.
The odds were just as critical for the North. War weariness was in full force, and Abraham Lincoln was facing uncertain reelection prospects that November.
For two months, the two armies had been coiled around the city inside entrenchments. Gen. John Bell Hood’s appointment as commander of the Confederate forces there changed everything. Aggressive to a fault, he lashed out at the Union troops under Gen. Willian T. Sherman with a series of savagely bloody attacks. There were the Battles of Peachtree Creek, Atlanta and Ezra Church. Each time, the gray came close, but not close enough, to breaking the blue lines.
As August dwindled down to its last day, Hood decided to try one final roll of the dice. And wouldn’t you know it, that was precisely when a baby decided to arrive.
It must have been a challenging pregnancy for Nancy Holt. Six weeks shy of turning 20, she had a toddler son and a husband who was fighting with Lee’s army 500 miles away in the trenches near Richmond, Va.
So, she stayed with her parents at their home in Clayton County, just south of Atlanta. Fans of the movie “Gone With the Wind” will recognize it as the site of the fictitious Tara, home of Scarlett O’Hara. This was no moonlight and magnolias mansion. It was a small, simple place — and it was smack dab in the worst possible location.
Hood attacked at Jonesborough (modern Jonesboro) the next day — just as Nancy went into labor. There was nowhere the family could flee. They were trapped in a combat zone.
“They say that just before I was born, a ball was shot through the wall of my mother’s bedroom,” Anna Holt Tidwell told an Atlanta newspaper 80 years later. “It came through the head of the bed and landed by the fireplace.”
Nancy’s father, Calvin Kite, the grandpa-to-be, did the only thing he could do in that unenviable situation.
“He went out in the yard and raised a white flag,” Anna explained. “He hoped it would get the Yankees’ attention so they would stop firing in our direction.”
It worked. A federal cavalryman soon rode up and asked what was going on. Told the situation, he dashed off.
“Then ’fore long, a Yankee doctor come to the house and tended mother till I was born.” With men on both sides dying nearby, Anna’s entry into the world was greeted by the roar of cannons.
But there was an important difference now. The federals were aiming the artillery away from the house. The baby’s arrival had altered their battleplan.
Nancy allowed the doctor to name the girl. “He picked me up and named me Shell Anna Marvillier Hoyt. That means ‘a marvelous escape from a shell.’”
The family called her Anna. Her father would be captured and sent to a POW camp in New York state and wouldn’t see his daughter for the first time until peace returned. He and Nancy went on to have nine more children.
Anna eventually married and became a mom herself. Looking back toward the end of her long and eventful life, she confessed to one thing.
“I kinda wish they had called me Marvillier,” she said in her old age. “I think that’s a real pretty name.” Instead, she was affectionately addressed by the Deep Southern drawled version of her second name: “Anner.” In fact, her obituary was headlined, “Mrs. Anner Tidwell,” when she passed away in 1947 at age 83.
It’s a shame the name of the doctor who delivered her has been lost to history. Country docs loved telling stories about the unusual situations where they had delivered babies. And his yarn must have topped them all.
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