Profile written and provided courtesy Nowell Briscoe ( [email protected] )

MOINA MICHAEL

“THE POPPY LADY”

AUGUST 15, 1869 – MAY 19, 1944

        I think it goes without saying that of all the graves in Rest Haven, the most sought out and most visited grave belongs to one known to folks all over the world as simply, “The Poppy Lady”, Moina Michael.

        Fame was perhaps the last thing in the world Moina Belle Michael ever expected to happen to her which would make her name synonymous with a little red flower. Because of the impact a poem written by Colonel John McCrae in April 1915 during the second battle of Ypres in World War I had upon her, Monia Michael would be forever linked to that flower and poem along with the response she penned.

        Moina Michael was the eldest daughter of John Marion and Alice Sherwood Wise Michael, born near Good Hope on August 15, 1869. She grew up during the bitter period of reconstruction amid the surroundings of plantation life.  Her paternal grandparents, William & Laney Cannon Michael, came to Oglethorpe County from North Carolina and later moved to Walton County where they built a home in the woods very close to what is now known as Good Hope.  Of their children, only William LaFayette and John Marion lived to adulthood and married.

        John Marion, Moina’s father, served in Company C, 9^th Regiment, Georgia Volunteer Infantry under Captain George Hillyer and served as a part of Captain W. D. Grant’s cavalry during the Civil War.  When the war ended, he returned back to the plantation of his father and began farming the land.  He married Alice Sherwood and became parents of seven children.

        Moina received her early education at Braswell Academy in Morgan County and at Martin Institute in Jefferson.  She taught school in a log cabin on her father’s plantation as well as in an old store in Good Hope.  Later in her life she attended Lucy Cobb Institute and The Normal School in Athens and Columbia University in New York.  She taught school in Greene & Liberty counties, Braswell Academy, Apalachee, Social Circle, Madison and Monroe. She was a lady principal at Bessie Tift College in Forsyth and the last 25 years of her active life, she was a member of the staff at the University of Georgia.

        It was Saturday morning, November 9, 1918, two days before the World War I armistice, when Moina Michael was sitting at her desk at the Overseas Y.M.C.A. headquarters in New York, leafing through a copy of Ladies Home Journal, when a poem written by Colonel John McCrae, caught her eye:

                                In Flanders Fields

                        In Flanders Fields the poppies blow

                        Between the crosses, row by row.

                        That mark our place; and in the sky

                        The larks, still bravely singing, fly.

                        Scarce heard amidst

                        The guns below.

It was the last verse of this poem that made such an impact on her:

                        If ye break faith with us who die

                        We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

                        In Flanders fields.

        The wave of emotion that swept over her as she read the poem caused her to study deeply the meaning of the message Captain McCrae was trying to convey. After pondering over the poem for some time, she came upon the idea of the Flanders Field Poppy which would become the memorial emblem for veterans.  She hastily grabbed a yellowed envelope and penned a reply to McCrae’s poem on the back of the envelope which was entitled, “We Shall Keep the Faith”.

        On November 9, 1948, the 30^th anniversary of the date of her poppy idea, the Postal Service commemorated the event with the issue of a 3-cent stamp engraved with her portrait and poppies. Near her old home place, now long gone, stands a granite boulder signifying the site where she was born and her originating the poppy as the war memorial emblem.  A memorial marker on the Monroe-Madison highway points towards the birth place of the Poppy Lady.

        Moina Michael died on May 19, 1944 in Athens and now rests here close to her parents. The marble slab covering her grave contains a replica of the Flanders Fields poppy entwined with the torch of Liberty. The last stanza of McCrae’s poem also is on the marker which is just as stirring today as when Miss Michael read it so very long ago.