Eugene Mitchell

Eugene Muse Mitchell (October 13, 1866 – June 17, 1944) was an American lawyer, politician, and historian. He served as the President of the Atlanta Board of Education from 1911 to 1912, during which time he eliminated the use of corporal punishment in city schools. He owned a law firm in Atlanta, and was a co-founder of the Atlanta Historical Society. He was married to the prominent Catholic activist and suffragist Maybelle Stephens Mitchell and was the father of Margaret Mitchell, who wrote the novel Gone With the Wind.

Family background and early life

Mitchell was from a prominent Georgia family descended from Thomas Mitchell, a colonial land surveyor originally from Aberdeenshire in Scotland who settled in Wilkes County in 1777 and served in the American Revolutionary War. His great-grandfather, William Mitchell, was born in Edgefield County, South Carolina and owned a farm near Flat Rock. His grandfather, Issac Green Mitchell, farmed in Flat Rock before selling his property to Ira O. McDaniel and purchasing a farm on the north side of the South River in DeKalb County.

His father was Russel Crawford Mitchell, a wealthy lawyer and lumber industrialist who served in the Texas Brigade, an infantry formation of the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. He was severely wounded at the Battle of Sharpsburg and demoted for "inefficiency", later serving as a nurse in Atlanta. After the war, he made a large fortune supplying lumber for the rebuilding of Atlanta, which had been largely destroyed during the Battle of Atlanta, becoming one of the richest men in Atlanta and serving as the city's mayor.