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Whistler's Mother's Home Part of an old brick chimney and the remains of a brick wall in a tangle of growth are the only traces left of stately Oak Forest, the plantation where James McNeill Whistler's mother, Anna, was born and reared. Anna McNeill fell in love with a West Point classmate of her brother's, but the cadet, G. W. Whistler, married another woman. After seven years of marriage and three children, Whistler's wife died and he renewed his romance with Anna. They married when she was twenty-seven, and Anna gave birth to five sons. Her firstborn, James, nicknamed Jamey, would become a painter and make his mother famous. After G. W. Whistler, an engineer, took a job building a railroad in Russia, tragedy befell the family. Anna, who had followed her husband abroad, lost him and three of her sons to illness and returned to this country. For a while during the Civil War, she lived at Oak Forest, but her uneasiness at being the widow of a West Point man prompted her to move to safety in Paris. It was there that her son James visited her and painted her portrait. He called it Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist's Mother, but it became known as Whistler's Mother. Owner by the French government, it is on permanent exhibit at the Musee d' Orsay in Paris. Anna McNeill Whistler died in 1881 at age seventy-seven and is buried in England. Oak Forest, built in 1737, burned in 1933. The remains are just north of Clarkton on an unpaved road, a half mile off State Road 1760, 1/10 of a mile from US 701.
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