Ellamae Ellis League was a “steel magnolia” long before actresses Julia Roberts, Sally Field and Shirley MacLaine helped popularize the phrase.
In 1922 — 100 years ago — she was a single mom with two children, with no idea how they would get by. Within 12 years, she had cleared more hurdles than a track star to open her own architectural practice in Macon, on the way to a pioneering 53-year career.
Shannon Fickling, a Macon architect and former Historic Macon staffer, knew League’s daughter, Jean Newton — a Harvard-trained architect — when Fickling was growing up, but she didn’t know all that League had accomplished.
“It was not until much later that it became obvious what a trailblazer (League) had been,” Fickling said. “What she was able to accomplish was astounding for her era, and most of the men I worked for had started their careers in her studio.”
League’s high school graduation photo.
League was born in Macon in 1899. After high school, she attended Wesleyan College for just a year, leaving school at age 18 to marry George Forrest League, a man nine years her elder. (An omen? At their wedding, a candelabra near the couple caught fire while they were saying their vows, igniting League’s veil.)
Within five years, the two had divorced, leaving the 23-year-old League in Macon with two small children to raise — and no means of support.
In her book “Dear Mr. Ellamae,” League’s granddaughter, Cheri Dennis, says her research of family letters suggested that friction in the marriage “stemmed from a feeling on Ellamae’s part that George Forrest treated her as less than his equal,” and “this kind of disregard was not acceptable.”
Customs of the times were deeply ingrained, of course. If a woman worked outside the home — just 1 in 5 did — it was usually to teach or as a clerk, a typist, a waitress or a telephone operator.
Ellamae with her two children, Jean and Joe.
“Finding herself divorced and alone to provide for her two children must have felt daunting in 1922,” Dennis says in her book. “I would imagine that Southern ladies were her biggest critics and secretly harbored envy at her bravery, but behaved to the contrary.”
Change was coming. The 19th amendment — giving women the right to vote — had passed in 1920. Still, the prevailing attitude in many quarters was that women should not work outside the home — that they would be taking jobs away from men who needed them more.
Six generations of League’s family on her mother’s side had been architects, and an uncle, Charles Edward Choate, was still practicing. The firm of Elliott Dunwody and William Oliphant hired her to do office work.
That setting ignited her drive to become an architect herself, but there were obstacles. Georgia Tech, the primary venue for architecture education in Georgia, did not admit women — and wouldn’t until after World War II. The only opportunity open to League was through an apprenticeship of up to 10 years.
So that’s what she did at Dunwody & Oliphant from 1922 to 1929. She also took correspondence courses and studied for a year in France.
This was League’s office near First Presbyterian Church.
In 1934, in the clutches of the Great Depression, she opened her own office on the third floor of the Grand Building. In 1940, she moved to an office (that she designed) across the street between what is now The Library Ballroom building and First Presbyterian Church. At the time, just 2 percent of American architects were women, and women who were principals in their own firms were virtually nonexistent.
“Ellamae had to forge her own way and seemed to spend as little time as possible thinking about it or apologizing to anyone else about it,” Dennis said.
Most female architects specialized — or were expected to specialize — in residential architecture. League, though, took on a variety of complex projects over the years and set herself apart.
In her first year of practice alone, she was commissioned to build a reservoir, two church buildings, a service station, six homes, and two restorations. One of her earliest commissions was to help reconstruct one of Macon’s earliest buildings, the 1806 Fort Hawkins blockhouse.
Later, she added school buildings, public housing, office buildings and several projects for Bibb Manufacturing Co. She took on the huge addition of the old Macon Hospital in the early 1950s, and she designed the sanctuary and youth center at Mulberry United Methodist Church, where she worshiped.
“She loved that she could build things, make them work and restore order and beauty,” Dennis says in her book (available for $9.95 at the Historic Macon office, with proceeds donated to HMF.) Her “restoration came not in making a marriage work but in making herself work.”
When demolition threatened Macon's Grand Opera House in 1967 — right across the street from her office — League helped form the Macon Arts Council to save it, and she later supervised the restoration of that building in 1969 and 1970. (The narrow park between the Grand and First Presbyterian Church, in fact, is named for her.)
She also designed the “Grand Topper” house,” built to raise money to save and restore the Grand. Cher and Gregg Allman were among the home’s owners over the years.
“Old buildings and their pasts did not scare her,” Dennis said.
League’s home in the Shirley Hills neighborhood.
League’s house in the Shirley Hills neighborhood incorporated forward-thinking elements, including the size and placement of windows that provided cross-ventilation. The tri-level floor plan, built-in garage and use of natural materials — redwood siding and roof shingles, for example — were popular on the West Coast at the time, but they would not become prevalent in Georgia for years.
“Architecture has to follow the trends in living,” League once said. “There are new materials, new technologies, new lifestyles. … Life’s moving tides must be embraced and adaptation made if one is to be successful.”
(League’s daughter, Jean, lived in the house with her mom for a while. Jean’s daughters, Edith Newton Wilson and Suzy Newton, established the Jean League Newton AIA Fund at the Community Foundation of Central Georgia, which pays for a summer internship at Historic Macon.)
Historic Macon recently acquired the League home and is restoring it, thanks to a $75,000 grant from The 1772 Foundation. That project will be the first in a new HMF program, Matchless Macon, which will focus on renewing architectural and cultural marvels across Macon. Historic Macon is hosting this year’s Major Donor reception at the house on May 24.
League often kept to herself. “Privacy was a code she lived by, so she didn’t make small talk or gossip,” Dennis said. “She loved purely, giving and expecting absolutely nothing in return.
“She had a steel frame with a soft belly. She never slumped, even in her 90s, displaying her steel. When she did suffer or was sick, she dug in quietly and did what she needed to do.”
She was “a shining example of stoicism who taught (her son Joe) by her example to suck it up.”
League had plenty of outside interests. She loved to bake (cakes and divinity were among her favorites). She loved to read and go to plays, to entertain and “to be quiet.”
She dressed simply but with “quiet elegance,” Dennis said. “She loved wools and silks and clothing that felt good and was finely crafted. Her home — and mine — she built with natural redwood that was untreated because she loved the richness of it, and it was combined with old brick that had scars and signs of age.” Ellamae loved the stories these natural materials told of growth and struggles.
“Like life, these old things could be restored and refreshed and reused to build something beautiful.”
In an interview with The Macon Telegraph in 1962, League refused to seek any special consideration as a woman in the male-dominated architectural field. She told a reporter: “I am always an architect. Not a woman architect, but an architect. I encourage women going into the profession not to concentrate on being separate as a woman but to concentrate on being a good architect.”
League was just the fourth woman registered as an architect in Georgia, and in 1944 she became the first woman in the state to be named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (The notification letter was addressed to “Mr. Ellamae League.)
Over the years, she mentored — and inspired — scores of young architects. “She filled the office with budding architects and let them get a taste” of the profession, Dennis said. “She was at her best when she was teaching young people.”
She practiced from 1922 until she retired in 1975. She died in 1991 and is buried in Riverside Cemetery.
“Ellamae had a peace about her that I couldn’t understand until I reached my own golden years,” Dennis says in her book. “The peace came from ashes, like it always does, ashes of loss but with gratitude for all that she had. She never seemed to look back.
“Many live life with the ending of their story in mind,” Dennis said. “Some start out wanting to hold a particular office or do a particular thing to contribute to society or make a contribution so their name lands in the history books. Ellamae’s was not such a story. She let life events take her where she was going in large part. I think that she liked her story in the end.”
