My husband-to-be, James Stokely, told me I would enjoy meeting the patriarch of this place. He was right. Edmund Cody Burnett and his gracious wife, Elizabeth, were among that vast company of second and third and once-removed and twice-removed relatives James so enjoyed. More important, however, was the kinship they shared in their respect for intellectual achievement a sense of place, and a sense of history. (James always contended that Burnett genes were a major source of his interest in books. And I was elated when I discovered that it was a Burnett doctor in East Tennessee who had given the English writer Frances Hodgson her last name of Burnett before she wrote "The Secret Garden," one of my favorite childhood books.)

On that long ago summer afternoon Edmund Burnett spoke in soft but forceful voice of the acres which had been a grant for an ancestor’s service in the Revolutionary War [??]. His rather small, spare frame gained stature by the dignity— an old-fashioned, self-assured dignity— with which he walked. His gray hair was thinning but the keenness and sparkle in his blue eyes was in no way diminished.

He and his family spent only their summers on the farm there in Del Rio. During the rest of the year he lived in Washington, D.C., where be pursued a distinguished career as historian of the Continental Congress. (Each of his four children went on to follow significant careers of their own.)

In this man’s conversation and refreshing articles of local history which he wrote, affection for a place and its past gained meaning because of his exploration of that past in painstaking, fascinating detail. It is such research — or intimate knowledge — and writing, that is blessed by subsequent historians and writers.

My remembrance of this distinguished Tennessean and his family was brought to mind by a Library of Congress Catalogue of Acquisitions which recently came to hand. There was Dr. Burnett’s full-page picture, natural and contemplative with his pipe and direct, almost twinkling, gaze. The accompanying article is an appreciation of the personal and professional papers donated to the manuscript division of the library by Burnett’s family.

The article is formal and informative. I quote it, at least in part, so that it will be a matter of local record, the contribution of this Cocke Countian, East Tennessean, American historian.

"Edmund Cody Burnett was born to Rev. Jesse M.L. and Henrietta (Cody) Burnett on a Henry County, Alabama, plantation in the midst of the Civil War. Two years later his family moved to a large farm near Jefferson City, Tennessee, where he matured and graduated from Carson College (now Carson and Newman College) in 1888. Thereafter, Burnett received his doctoral degree from Brown University, Rhode Island. and lived for 40 years in Washington, D.C., but he never pulled his roots from rural Tennessee, returning every summer to the family farm in Del Rio, which he managed for most of his adult life.

"Despite his training as a historian, Burnett began his academic career teaching mathematics and Greek at Carson College and then English at Bethel College in Kentucky. For five years Burnett was a history professor at Mercer University, Georgia, before joining in 1907 the staff of the Department of Historical Research at the Carnegie Institute, Washington, D.C. where his former Brown University mentor J. Franklin Jameson, served as director of historical research.

"At the Carnegie Institution, Burnett worked on an ongoing project editing letters and documents of delegates to the Continental Congress. Burnett quickly grasped the significance of this project and made the study of the Continental Congress and the publication of its historical sources his lifework. His major publications, still widely esteemed as landmarks in American historiography, include the eight-volume edition of ‘Letters of Members of the Continental Congress,’ published between 1921 and 1936, and a narrative history, ‘The Continental Congress’ published by the Macmillan Company in 1941. The edited volumes were the backbone for generations of historical studies of the Continental Congress.

The papers in the Library of Congress Collection deal with matters closer to home, however. The Catalogue says the "collection, which he had stored in a specially constructed library building on his farm in Tennessee, documents the history of the extended Burnett-Cody families through more than a century, through Georgia to Alabama to Tennessee to Washington, D.C. through war and peace, through occupations as varying as farming, medicine, religion, education and law.

"Managing his tobacco, grain and stock farm in Tennessee from his residence in Washington D.C., nine months each year required of Burnett a frequent and detailed correspondence with business firms, agents and relatives."

In addition to these letters about farm affairs, there are 50 letters written during a long courtship of Suzan Elizabeth Susong before he married her at the age of 50. Three groups of nearly 200 letters are those written by participants in the Civil War.

Edmund Burnett’s roots run deep in Tennessee and reach wide in our national history.

Wilma Dykeman is a prize-winning author of 18 books, a nationally recognized lecturer and Tennessee State Historian.