Category: Architecture

The Background

Between 1898 and 1899, when he designed and oversaw construction of the church’s sanctuary, Norrman — who worshiped Norse gods — made several audaciously disparaging remarks about Christian Science beliefs, drawing rebuke from Mrs. Mims.

It’s hard to determine if Norrman and Mims were truly adversaries or if they just enjoyed taunting each other — perhaps it was a little of both.

Here, Norrman’s friend Wallace Putnam Reed recounted a humorous exchange between Norrman and Mrs. Mims, published in January 1900 for his weekly column in The Augusta Chronicle.

“I see that Architect Godfrey L. Norrman, of Atlanta, has been in Augusta in consultation with the owners of the burned district. Mr. Norrman is not only an accomplished architect, but has a fine sense of humor. He was the architect for the Christian Science Temple in Atlanta, which was erected by Mrs. Livingston Mims. It is a beautiful building of pure white, built after the pattern of the Parthenon, and is made of white plaster over brick walls. When the work was completed and Mrs. Mims was looking at the pretty structure, she exclaimed, “It is beautiful, but I wish it was marble,” whereupon Architect Norrman promptly replied: “Well, Mrs. Mims, you just think it marble, and it will be marble.” It seems that several times during the building of the Temple Mr. Norrman had complained of some indisposition and the Christian Scientist said to him: “Mr. Norrman, just think you are well, and you will be well.” The architect desired her to apply her doctrine to the temple.”²

References

1. Morgan, Thomas H. “The Georgia Chapter of The American Institute of Architects”. The Atlanta Historical Bulletin, Volume 7, No. 28 (September 1943): p. 93. ↩︎
2. “By Hook or By Crook”. The Augusta Chronicle, January 7, 1900, p. 4. ↩︎

The Background

Continuing an apocalyptic theme established in his previous article about G.L. Norrman, in May 1899, Wallace Putnam Reed of The Atlanta Constitution wrote the following article entitled “A Scientist’s Dream and Its Terrors”.

In the story, Norrman and a friend — undoubtedly Reed himself — discussed the potential cataclysmic effects of an earthquake in the Isthmus of Panama. The conversation was spurred by Norrman’s interest in the 1692 Jamaica earthquake, as he was said to “devote considerable attention to such exceptional freaks of nature”.

Norrman then went to sleep and experienced what he described as “the worst dream I ever had”, picturing his own slow, agonizing death — a curious foreshadowing of his actual death by suicide 10 years later.

The story was published by several other newspapers throughout the United States.

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A Scientist’s Dreams and Its Terrors

Some time ago Mr. Godfrey L. Norrman read a thrilling account of the great earthquake which destroyed the old city of Port Royal in the West Indies.

The narrative interested him, and he could not dismiss it from his mind.

His fondness for scientific studies had caused him to devote considerable attention to such exceptional freaks of nature, and the story of the Port Royal disaster led him to speculate upon the possibilities of similar calamities in future.

One evening the matter came up while he was conversing with a friend who took a deep interest in such subjects, and in the course of their talk some startling theories and suggestions were discussed.

“What would be the result if an earthquake should up tear up the Isthmus of Panama?” asked Mr. Norrman’s friend.

“It would be far-reaching in its effects,’ was the reply, ‘and it would doubtless make the region we live in uninhabitable.”

“You are right,” said the other. “I have studied the matter for years, and I have formed some very positive opinions about it. The great earthquakes of the past in the tropics may be repeated. Possibly they will occur in new localities, and on a gigantic scale. the Panama isthmus is only about fifty miles wide. Now, it would be easy for a big earthquake to tear a chasm several miles wide through that narrow strip of land.”

“Just so,” assented Mr. Norrman.

“Very well,” continued the prophet of evil. “It is understood that the Pacific is perhaps fully two inches lower than the Atlantic. You know what would happen.”

“Yes,” answered the interested listener, “the gulf stream would change its course.”

“Change is no name for it,” said the talker. “The gulf stream would rush with fearful velocity through the chasm into the Pacific and where would we be?”

“Buried under mountains of snow and ice,” replied the other.

“No doubt about that,” said the man who was predicting future horrors. “The loss of the gulf stream would suddenly change our climate. The gulf would freeze into a solid mass of ice. Florida would be covered with snow-clad glaciers, and Georgia would be bleak and cold as Alaska. The change would kill almost every living thing, but after some years this frozen territory would have a suitable animal and vegetable life. Polar bears would be numerous and perhaps tribes of hardy people like the Eskimos would live here. Other quarters of the globe would send exploring expeditions in this direction, and new Pearys and Andrees would try to discover traces of our buried civilization.”

“Do you really believe all of this?” asked Mr. Norrman.

“Yes, don’t you?”

“Some of it—I hardly know to what extent,” was the response, “but I am inclined to agree with you that such a convulsion as you suggest would suddenly revolutionize our climate and make it impossible for us to live here. The diversion of the gulf stream would probably give us conditions similar to those of the arctic region.”

There was more talk on the same line, and at a late hour Mr. Norrman went to bed with his head full of some very sensational theories, facts and predictions.

Naturally, he had a dream, and it goes without saying that it was a holy terror. He was ripe for it—in the very state of mind for a nightmare.

At first the dreamer found it very pleasant. He was on one of the islands near the Florida peninsula, and the glories of that flowery land and the summer sea dazzled and delighted him.

Suddenly he staggered and came near falling. He felt dizzy and sick. The waves began rolling mountain high, and the island seemed to be rocking.

What was the matter?

A telegraph operator rushed out of his office and shouted to a group of tourists:

“An earthquake has torn the isthmus of Panama wide open from sea to sea!”

The tourists hurried away to carry the news to their families.

Mr. Norrman was left alone on the beach.

He had been watching numerous ships at a distance as they moved slowly over the waters.

All at once their speed increased. They began to move rapidly, and in a short time they darted by in the direction of the Isthmus, so quickly that the spectator wondered how those on board could breathe. The vessels seemed to fly like arrows.

The stiff breeze, growing stronger very moment, was getting colder.

The solitary watcher on the beach felt too weak to walk to in a place of shelter, and he was glad to sit down where a huge rock shielded him from the gale.

He remained there some two or three hours. The ships were no longer visible. Great masses of white fog advanced from every quarter, and a heavy snow began falling.

The white fog began freezing, and big masses of ice could be seen in the gulf, circling around the island, while in the distance icebergs loomed up all in their white and awful splendor.

Unable to move, the man by the rock felt that he was rapidly and surely freezing to death. The ground about him was covered with ice and snow. He was chilled to the very narrow, and shivered like an aspen leaf.

No human being ever suffered more than Mr. Norrman during that frightful ordeal. Certain death apparently was his doom, and he gave up all hope. His tortures were so unbearable that he was anxious to die and end his misery. His ears, nose, feet and hands were frozen, and it was impossible for him to crawl.

Yet his mind was abnormally active. He recalled all that he had ever read and heard about the horrors of arctic life, and he felt the keenest curiosity about the extent of the earthquake and its effects upon the south Atlanta and gulf states.

Even in those moments of excruciating pain his thoughts turned to Georgia, and he laughed deliriously when he pictured to himself the astonishment of the promenaders in their spring costumes on Peachtree street when they lost their climate at one fell swoop, and found the snow drifts piling up around them.

But human endurance has its limit.

A tremendous howl exploding from his own throat awoke Mr. Norrman, and leaping from his bed, with chattering teeth and shaking limbs, he made a rush for the grate, and got as close as he possibly could to the fire.

It was a pleasant spring night, but he was nearly frozen, and it took an hour to restore its circulation.

“That was the worst dream I ever had,” said Mr. Norrman, “and it makes me shiver to think of it.“

Wallace P. Reed¹

References

1. Reed, Wallace Putnam. “A Scientist’s Dream and Its Terrors”. The Atlanta Constitution, May 5, 1899, p. 4. ↩︎

The Background

Atlanta and the United States were in the throes of the Great Blizzard of 1899 when Wallace Putnam Reed, a friend of G.L. Norrman‘s, wrote the following article as part of his weekly column in The Atlanta Constitution.

Two days before the article’s publication, Atlanta received 6.5 inches of snow and recorded its all-time low temperature of nearly -9 °F^{1 2} in a cataclysmic nationwide cold snap.

Described by one forecaster as “probably the most remarkable in the history of the country”,³ the blizzard left hundreds of Atlantans stranded without food and fuel for heat,^{4 5 6} and caused more than $1 million of crop losses in Georgia and $100,000 of pipe damage in Atlanta.^{7 8}

With the ice and snow still melting, Reed asked a timely question: “Is our climate changing?”, and introduced his readers to Norrman’s belief that Earth’s geographic poles cataclysmically shifted at earlier points in its history, a debunked pseudo-scientific theory that was first hypothesized in the late 19th century.

The article served as a promotion for Norrman’s pamphlet, Architecture as Illustrative of Religious Belief, in which he explained his pole-shift hypothesis, among other theories.

Here, Reed referred to the infamous “Cold Friday” of 1833, which was previously reputed as the coldest day on record in the Atlanta area,⁹ although the city didn’t even exist at that point. Reed also mentioned Terminus and Marthasville — both were early names for Atlanta.¹⁰

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Our Polar Weather And Its Suggestions

Is our climate changing?

Occasionally this question is asked in a humorous way by some old-timer who takes the position that the war ruined everything down this way, including our weather.

But the suggestion has a serious aspect.

A few exceptionally cold winters in the course of a century, or a dozen centuries, would not be conclusive proof of a permanent change of climate.

This globe of ours is very old. According to the scientists, it is at least 100,000 years old, and in that period many remarkable physical revolutions have occurred.

Of course we have had very cold spells in Georgia before the present age. Everyone of my older readers is ready right now to remind me of that memorable and destructive freeze two generations ago, along the thirties, shortly before the big panic.

That was bad enough, but there were fewer people here to suffer in those days, and Atlanta escaped entirely, because there was then no Atlanta—not even Marthasville or Terminus; and I doubt whether Hardy Ivey [sic] had built his solitary cabin on the site of our metropolis.

It was a terrible visitation—that cold Friday. Fruit trees, vegetation and crops were ruined. Thousands of forest trees exploded–bursting wide open.

The people had not recovered when the panic came. then, cotton fell 3 or 4 cents, and many farmers lost everything. Their creditors pushed them to the wall, and sold them out, not sparing even their beds, pots and kettles and cheap tableware.

Some scientific men maintain that in the remote past this was a very cold region. Mr. G.L. Norrman touches upon the subject very entertainingly in his recent pamphlet, entitled “Architecture as Illustrative of Religious Belief.”

Mr. Norrman accounts for the flood by suggesting that sometime during the earth’s existence the accumulation and congealing of the vapors at the poles made them the largest diameter of the globe, and, when this took place, the earth naturally found its equilibrium on a different axis, and turned about 90 degrees.

This is a very startling suggestion, and there is a sufficient basis of fact for it to attract the attention of the thoughtful.

The pamphlet referred to in the foregoing paragraphs says that the poles were perhaps changed from some points near the present equator, taking the place of the former equator at points near the present poles. If such a change in the poles occurred, it would account for many curious phenomena on this sphere.

Such a change would of course change the beds of the oceans.

What are now productive valleys may have been the bottom of the ocean, and the present bed of the ocean may have been tilled valleys, ages and ages ago.

This change of the oceans would have caused a tremendous rush of the waters, destroying everything in their way.

It would account for the phosphate beds, where animals of every kind—lions, tigers, elephants, fish and reptiles—are piled together, as firmly as if a million Niagaras had rammed them in the crevices where they are found.

The coal beds, also, may have had a similar origin, though they may be traced to other causes.

Only some such catastrophe as the changing of poles will satisfactorily account for the remains of tropical plants and animals under the ice and snow in Siberia and Greenland, and the existence of glaciers at the equator.

Remains of tropical animals and plants could hardly have been in the arctic regions, unless that part of the earth had been tropical at some time, and unless a very sudden change in the temperature had taken place.

Whatever power caused the phosphate beds, the coal beds and the existence of tropical plants and animals under the ice and snow of the arctics was necessarily a power sufficiently great to destroy nearly every vestige of life and civilization.

Only on isolated mountain tops could life have been preserved.

People do not like to think of such gigantic convulsions of nature, and contemplate the possibility of their repetition.

Yet, the pendulum always swings backward. Its return may be delayed, but sooner or later it must come.

It is possible, therefore, that sometime in the future another violent shock will cause the present poles and the equator to change places; or again reoccupy their former localities.

The human mind can hardly grasp the full meaning of such a change.

Under such conditions the now frozen regions around the poles would be transformed into productive garden spots, while our south Atlantic and gulf states would be buried under mountains of perpetual snow and ice.

Intrepid explorers would probably make their way to Georgia, Florida and Cuba, and return to their tropical Greenland homes with big stories of the polar bears and reindeers seen in this locality.

Fortunately, there is no immediate danger, unless a tremendous earthquake should unexpectedly bring about the change.

For hundreds, and possibly thousands of years to come, this will probably remain the sunny south, with a delightful climate, and a rapidly increasing productive capacity.

The speculations of the scientists will not justify anybody in knocking off work and neglecting the improvement of their real estate.

If Georgia ever becomes an arctic territory again, it will probably be thousands of years hence. By that time our history will have been forgotten. New races may then live here. Perhaps not a vestige of our present civilization will remain.

So we need not concern ourselves bout these matters.

Some years ago there was a very brilliant Atlantian of a scientific turn of mind who was greatly worried over the idea that an earthquake or a canal across the isthmus of Panama might divert the gulf stream from its course, and turn this region into a frozen waste, where no human beings could exist, but his warnings did not alarm many people.

Let us leave the calamities of the future to those who will have to bear them. In the meantime we have our hands full taking care of ourselves and the sufferers at our doors during our occasional blizzards.

Wallace P. Reed¹¹

References

1. “Coldest Ever Known in Atlanta; Eight Degrees Below at 7 O’Clock”. The Atlanta Journal, February 13, 1899, p. 1. ↩︎
2. ‘Coldest Day on Record Yesterday; Celebrated “Cold Friday” Outdone’. The Atlanta Constitution, February 14, 1899, p. 1. ↩︎
3. “Back of Blizzard Is Broken; Work for the Needy Yesterday”. The Atlanta Constitution, February 15, 1899, p. 1. ↩︎
4. ibid. ↩︎
5. “Coldest Ever Known in Atlanta; Eight Degrees Below at 7 O’Clock”. The Atlanta Journal, February 13, 1899, p. 1. ↩︎
6. “How Atlanta Furnished Food and Fuel to Sufferers from the Cold”. ↩︎
7. “How Blizzard Struck Georgia; Peach Crop Will Be a Failure”. The Atlanta Constitution, February 14, 1899, p 1. ↩︎
8. “Effect and Cost of Blizzard to Atlanta and Georgia”. The Atlanta Journal, February 15, 1899, p. 5. ↩︎
9. ‘Coldest Day on Record Yesterday; Celebrated “Cold Friday” Outdone’. The Atlanta Constitution, February 14, 1899, p. 1. ↩︎
10. History of Atlanta – Wikipedia ↩︎
11. Reed, Wallace P. “Our Polar Weather and Its Suggestions”. The Atlanta Constitution, February 15, 1899, p. 4. ↩︎