Furlow Masonic Female College. “All that is Bright Must Fade.” [manuscript caption title]

“All that is Bright Must Fade”

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Schoolgirl essay “All that is Bright Must Fade” penned by Jessie W. Pittman of Eufaula, Alabama. Pittman wrote her essay and prepared a decorative calligraphic title page for it while she was a student at Furlow Masonic Female College in Americus, Georgia.

Pittman’s reflections on the beauties of art and nature contrast with “the pomp of human greatness,” which she declares “perishable and vain,” and the decay of winter. Her writing evokes gothic themes of death and ruin and “the bat and owl.”. Where she recalls the faded glories of Rome and Babylon, Pittman may well be composing an elegy for the South that was defeated in the Civil War:

The architect rears his proud fabric; gilded dome and lofty minarets, rise before his eyes, the massive stone, the glittering marble, the proud oak, the lofty pine, all yield to his hand, and are wrought into shapes of strength and magnificence that seemingly would last to the end of time Monuments to the dead rise in their splendor, fashioned and adorned by the hand of man whose inventive genius loves to honor the home of the dead. … The originator looks on the work and sighs to think that time must lay its cold and unsparing fingers upon them, that the burnished dome and gilded spire must be dimmed by the blight of the destroyer. … “All that is bright must fade” is written on the fair face of childhood when the cold touch of death locks the bright little form in its dreamless sleep.

Furlow Masonic Female College was chartered by the State of Georgia in 1859. It was established by Americus Lodge #13 under the patronage of Col. Timothy Mathews Furlow and others. During the Civil War, the Confederate army’s Bragg Hospital was set up in the college’s main building. Former Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens and Georgia Poet Sidney Lanier each delivered a commencement address at Furlow Masonic Female College. The last class of women graduated from the college in 1879.

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