Read more Chattanooga History Columns
- Gaston: Paul John Kruesi was Edison's right-hand man
- Robbins: The old Richardson's house and the Civil War
- Gaston: James Williams was a man of the world
- Raney: Mason Evans, the 'Wild Man of the Chilhowee'
- Gaston: The legacy of Adolph Ochs endures
- Martin: Ed Johnson said, 'I have a changed heart,' the day before his lynching in Chattanooga on 1906
- Thomas: The inventiveness of Judge Michael M. Allison
- Moore: Chattanooga's first Chinese community
- Summers, Robbins: Chattanooga's Tuskegee Airman - Joseph C. White
- McCallie: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 says so!
- Gaston: John McCline's Civil War - from slave to D.C. parade
- Raney: Exploring Chattanooga businesses in the Green Book
- Elliott: Remembering the Freedmen's Bureau in Chattanooga
- Gaston: Nancy Ward was a beloved, respected Tennessean
- Martin: Prohibition - the noble experiment
- Elliott: 'A shameful, disgraceful deed': The destruction of the Sewanee cornerstone
- Gaston: Robert Cravens was ironmaster, Chattanooga area's first commuter
- Robbins: Dr. T.H. McCallie's Christmas 1863
- Robbins: Journalist writes of a trip to Missionary Ridge in 1896
- Summers, Robbins: Mine 21 disaster - gone but not forgotten
- Elliott: Collegedale incorporates to avoid Sunday 'blue laws'
- Gaston: 'Marse Henry' Watterson's journalism fame began in Chattanooga
- Robbins: Orchard Knob battle recalled in 1895
- Elliott: Chattanoogans joined in an 'orgy of joy and gladness' on Armistice Day, 1918
- Thomas: Noted service, speakers are marks of Rotary Club of Chattanooga since 1914
- Summers and Robbins: Remembering noted Tennessee author North Callahan
- Raney: 'I auto cry, I auto laugh, I auto sign my autograph'
- Gaston: Sequoyah's alphabet enriched Cherokees
- Robbins: A look at Sam Divine's life during the Civil War
- Robbins: Memories of a Confederate nurse
- Robbins: More notes from Bradford Torrey's 1895 visit to Chickamauga Battlefield
- Robbins: Journalist in 1895 details visit to Chickamauga Battlefield
- Elliott: Telephone exchange firebombing was distraction for grocery store robbery
- Gaston: Worcester brought Christ's message to Cherokee at Brainerd Mission
- Robbins: 1896 travel diary: 'A Week on Walden's Ridge'
- Gaston: Elizabeth Strayhorn, WAC Commandant at Fort Oglethorpe
- Robbins: The history of the Friends of Moccasin Bend National Park
- Moore: Do you own a Sears Roebuck home?
- Summers and Robbins: Camp Nathan Bedford Forrest in World War II
- Gaston: Hiram Sanborn Chamberlain remembered
- Elliott: Daisy the center of tile, ceramic manufacturing in Hamilton County
- Gaston: FDR inaugurates the Chickamauga Dam
- Summers, Robbins: Interned WWII Germans had it easy at Camp Crossville
- Elliott: A war correspondent on Lookout Mountain
- Gaston: Chickamaugas finally bury hatchet in Tennessee Valley
- Gaston: Chickamaugas in Chattanooga
- Robbins: The history of the Riverbend festival
- Raney: Sadie Watson, the first woman elected in Hamilton County government
- Moore: Remembering Chattanooga's Hawkinsville community
- Elliott: Welsh coal miners transformed Soddy after the Civil War
- Gaston: Chattanooga's best-kept secret
- Elliott: Cabell Breckinridge loses his horse
- Raney: Martin Fleming is the people's judge
- Gaston: The amazing career of Francis Lynde
- Martin: Hamilton County's Name Sake: Alexander Hamilton
- Summers, Robbins: The crosses at Sewanee
- Bledsoe: The fiery truce at Kennesaw Mountain
- Moore: Talented architect's life cut short by tragedy
- Rydell: Chattanooga's place in soccer history
- Robbins: Tennessee Coal, member of the First Dow Jones Industrial Average
- Raney: In the barber chair
- Lanier: Becoming the Boyce Station Neighborhood Association
- McCallie: John P. Franklin: Living history among us
- Barr: Chattanooga's first railroad: The Underground Railroad
- Summers, Robbins: Charles Bartlett was a Pulitzer Prize winner, Kennedy confidant
- Rainey: 'We have seen it'
- Elliott: Feinting and fighting at Running Water Creek and Johnson's Crook
- Gaston: The Spring Frog Cabin at Audubon Acres
- Raney: Wauhatchie Pike was moonshine motorway
- Robbins: Oakmont was home of venerable Williams clan
- Summers and Robbins: Rebirth of the Mountain Goat Line
- Elliott: Bad investments led to Soddy Bank failure in 1930
- Summers and Robbins: Pearl Harbor attack left football behind
- Gaston: Jolly’s Island namesake had long ties with Sam Houston
- Return Jonathan Meigs, Indian Agent
- Moore: Did you know about St. Elmo's other two cemeteries?
- Summers: Orme - Marion County's almost lost community
- Davis: Spooky revival at Sharp Mountain in 1873
- Robbins: The story of Longholm
- Raney: Women labored to help the U.S. win World War I
- Even in the city, the 'wheel' changed everything
- Murray: Confederate dilemma after Chickamauga
- J.B. Collins — Newsman extraordinaire
- Robbins: The Story of the Lyndhurst Mansion
- Chattanooga artist and wife lost on the Lusitania
- Chattanooga History Column: Battelle, Alabama and the Battelle Institute
- John Ross, a founder of Chattanooga
- Hamilton County casualties in World War I
- Chattanooga Power Couple
- 'Somewhere in France'
- The Ray Moss family
- Battery B from Chattanooga
- Ulysses S. Grant, Clark B. Lagow, and the Chattanooga Bender
- Songbirds Museum Timeline
- Hamilton County World War 1 roster
- The Soddy Girl and the Memphis Belle
- Blues icon Bessie Smith was the Empress of Soul
- Women's Army Corps at Chickamauga
- Emma Bell Miles' life at the top of the 'W'
- The Tivoli Wurlitzer is one of Chattanooga's priceless assets
- Chattanooga in struggle for freedom during Civil War
- October 1918, Chattanooga paralyzed by Spanish flu epidemic
- Eli Lilly and the Ditch of Death
- One hundred years ago, Chattanooga goes to war
- The legacy of Anna Safley Houston
- Harriet Whiteside was ahead of her time
- Southern Adventist University
- Chattanooga native's writings aided Civil Rights movement
- Zion College, Chattanooga's only African American College
- The North Shore's hidden past
- Mayme Martin -- Businesswoman and community leader
- Thomas Sim's epic struggle for freedom
- Top of Cameron Hill was price of rerouting interstate
- Cameron Hill has rich history
- Temperance movement included Harriman university
- The sweetest music this side of Heaven
- Conquistadors at Chattanooga
- Chattanooga and the 'General'
- Chattanooga's first Thanksgiving, 1863
- Chattanooga's greatest flood caught city unaware
- Opening the Cracker Line
- European trip in 1900 enlightens Sophia Scholze Long
- Sophia Scholze Long spoke out when others were silent
- Little South Pittsburg and its big silent movie stars
- Lot attendant recalls hottest job in Chattanooga
- Chattanooga's Forest Hills is final resting place for known, unknown
- Burritt College -- Pioneer of the Cumberlands
- Chattanooga's nicknames trace city's evolution
- The 25th annual meeting of the Tennessee Press Association
- Clemons Brothers Furniture Store
- The Short Life of the USS Chattanooga
- Ellen Jarnagin McCallie lived a truly remarkable life
- Dr. Jonathan Bachman was a revered city father
- Second guessing the Confederate failure on Missionary Ridge
- Nancy Kefauver, ambassador for the arts
- William Gibbs McAdoo kept his Southern roots
- Chattanooga's Secretary of the Treasury
- Howard Baker remembered as a statesman/photographer who snapped history
- Tivoli's last picture show
- The history of one of Chattanooga's oldest businesses
- Chattanooga's roller derby skaters
- Myths of Coca-Cola in Chattanooga
- Chattanooga's neighborhood grocery stores
- The tale of the Scottsboro Boys
- The people's history of Chattanooga
- Howard School is Chattanooga's reminder of Reconstruction
- Elevator operator, painter, mystery man: meet Rice Carothers
- Raulston Schoolfield made enemies amid his rise to power
- Website lets users peer into Chattanooga's past
- The flood of 1917
- Chattanooga's 'wickedest woman' buried at Forest Hills
- History of Cummings Highway
It was a painting of Disease.
In this case, it was the crimson pestilence that was the centerpiece of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," the blood-born plague that Poe described as "sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores."
And it fascinated Rice Carothers.
A student at Howard High School, he graduated in 1929 and landed a job as an elevator operator in the Chattanooga Times building. But while there, he "created a stir of interest among a small group of people interested in painting and talent."
Newspaper Librarian Nora Crimmins was one of those people. She purchased 10 of Rice's paintings based on books and sent them to the branch libraries. One that drew much praise was his painting of Disease from Edgar Allen Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death."
In 1931, Ruth Macrea, the Chattanooga Times magazine editor, wrote that Carothers' "ability to put into the picture the vision as he has conceived it shows thought, imagination and an unusual and innate talent for composition." Macrea also noted that Rice was taking a correspondence course in art. She urged someone to take an interest in this talented but untrained artist and provide him with assistance. Rice's only artistic schooling had been what he learned at Howard and what he learned by reading The History of Art.
Actually, little is known of Rice's personal life. We know he was born June 6, 1909. His father, Joseph Lemuel, worked as a barber; his mother, Nellie R., taught school at the Main Street School at 1315 Carter St. But Rice left no letters or diaries that detailed his desires or activities or the struggles he overcame as an African-American young man in the 1930s. What he did leave are some beautiful paintings and a little mystery about his life and art.
His best works were landscapes, sketches and portraits. As his talent became known in Chattanooga, he painted local celebrities including Adolph Ochs, Newell Sanders and Judge Will Cummings. The oil portrait of Ochs hung in Milton Ochs' office on the third floor of the Chattanooga Times building. Col. Ochs considered it "one of the best oil portraits" he had seen in years. Newell Sanders liked his portrait so well that he sent Rice $100 and displayed the painting in a Chattanooga bank lobby for years. Several Times employees possessed small paintings created by their gifted elevator operator, Rice Carothers.
Col. Ochs kept several of Carothers' paintings in his office and was instrumental in Rice's quest for professional training. Rice finally secured a place in New York City to study, and on April 17, 1934, The Chattanooga News wrote of Carothers' farewell party. He had "citizens of both races" who wished him well and spoke of his valued contributions, his "fidelity, industry, and desire to serve." E. Y. Chapin, president of the Chattanooga Public Library board, spoke of Rice's contributions to the Howard branch library and to the main library as well. Dr. J. M. Bynes, dentist, philosopher and leader in the African-American community, talked on Carothers' contributions to his race. Carothers spent 1934 to 1936 at the National Academy of Design in New York City. While studying, he also worked as an elevator operator at The New York Times.
World War II did not skip Rice Carothers. He enlisted in 1942 at Camp Forrest. While stationed at Blytheville, Ark., Cpl. Carothers presented a painting of an American warplane in flight to Maj. Gen. Ralph Royce, commander of the Army Air Forces Southeast Training Center. The New York Times reported on this gift on Feb. 14, 1943.
Unfortunately, not much is known of Carothers after World War II. He, his sister Delores, and his mother, Nellie, moved to Brooklyn where Nellie died in 1948. Her husband had died in 1943 and was buried in Forest Hills. Nellie was returned to Chattanooga and also buried in Forest Hills. According to Chattanooga city directories, Delores and Rice Carothers returned to Chattanooga around 1975. Rice Carothers died on June 24, 1997; Delores passed away Jan. 19, 2003. Neither obituary listed any next of kin.
Not much is known of the location of the many drawings Carothers created or what he painted while in New York. He is listed in the book Afro-American Artists as the painter of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse housed in the National Archives. The Chattanooga Library has seven small watercolors and one pen etching donated by Howard High School in 1934. The oil painting of Judge Will Cummings is also part of the archives. The public can view the paintings by visiting the library or by searching the library catalog. These art works are all that are known of a talented but little-known Chattanooga painter.
Suzette Raney is a librarian and archivist at the Chattanooga Public Library. For more information, visit the library or call 423 757-5317.