In the early part of the last century, at Christmastime, the Atlanta Journal customarily encouraged children of its readers to write Santa Claus short letters and entrust the newspaper with their safe delivery to the North Pole.

No suspicions were raised, apparently, when the Journal printed many of those letters a few days before the holiday.

And so it came to pass that the endearing, sometimes humorous wish lists of almost 300 kids filled two full pages in the edition published on December 23, 1908. In the middle of all that gray type, hidden in plain sight and forgotten for well over a century, was one that’s historically noteworthy:

Dear Santa Claus: I am a little girl nine years old. My papa is dead. I have no one to look to but mamma. We are very poor, too, I will ask you to bring what I want. A nice doll and carriage, a tea set, and something for mamma. Be careful and don’t get smutty. Your friend, MARY PHAGAN, College Park, Ga., Gate City Mills, No. 47.

I discovered the small item just a couple weeks ago during eleventh hour fact-checking for Andrew Young’s eight-part documentary series Atlanta Story, expected to air on Georgia Public Broadcasting early in 2026. Even after more than three years in production, I’m compelled to follow rabbits down wikiholes—and not for nothing. Very recent advances in technology have enabled us to use almost forensic detective work to investigate and uncover a fascinating, untold history of Atlanta.

As much as possible, I try to avoid clichés, but it actually did feel as if my heart skipped a beat.

Doubtlessly, you recognize the name, too.

The rape and murder of Mary Phagan in 1913 remains of the most infamous and sensational crimes in the storied history of Atlanta, if not the state and country, and was a particularly traumatic chapter in the life of this city. The tragic story has been told in countless articles, books, movies and TV shows, Alfred Uhry’s acclaimed Broadway musical Parade, and the old folk ballad by Fiddlin’ John Carson, “Little Mary Phagan”—but the single most definitive account, by far, is And the Dead Shall Rise, written by Steve Oney and published in 2003.

Mary was barely a teenager when her abused body was discovered in the basement of the National Pencil Factory on Forsyth Street, near what today we call “The Gulch” and now home to Centennial Yards, a downtown revitalization project. She earned 10-cents an hour, working 12-hour shifts at a machine that inserted rubber erasers into the metal tips of pencils.

The pencil factory was temporarily closed due to a shortage of materials, but April 26 was Confederate Memorial Day and Mary, having taken a trolley downtown to watch the parade, stopped to collect $1.20 she was owed for one day’s work. The discovery of her body in the factory basement led to the sensational trial and conviction (wrongful, most now believe) of the factory’s Jewish superintendent Leo Frank—and two years later, in 1915, his notorious lynching in Marietta and the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan atop Stone Mountain.

Oney, who is a friend, dedicated 15 years of painstaking research—the hard, old fashioned, pre-internet kind—and his beautifully written book identifies a number of prominent citizens who took part in Frank’s lynching—which, he proves conclusively, was not a random act of mob violence, but, rather, an unsanctioned execution orchestrated at the highest levels of state government.

He also was able to get a hold of a letter written by Mary to her cousin and friend Myrtle Barmore on December 30, 1912, just a few months before her death, and quotes it very early in his book. Perhaps ironically, that correspondence also mentioned Christmas—with Mary chiding Myrtle, “I don’t know what to think of you for not coming.”

I was excited to share the “find” with Oney. If anybody knew of Mary Phagan’s letter to Santa, it would have been him—but it came as a surprise. I don’t think anybody could have known—until now.

An enormous, ever-growing repository exists online at newspapers.com—which, of course, is great—but even in the recent past, you’d have to know where, what, and when to look. The game changer is optical recognition, which allows the digitized microfilm to be searched by keyword and date.

If you type “Mary Phagan” in the search bar and leave the “date” field blank, you get 88,625 hits. Narrow the search to Georgia newspapers, and that number shrinks to 2,987. But filter those in chronological order, oldest to newest, and at the very top of the list is just a single mention of that name before 1913.

Georgia’s child labor laws were “reformed” in 1906, setting 10 as the minimum age to work in a factory—yet, the little girl’s letter to Santa establishes she was nine when it was written—and already working at Gate City Mills, a mammoth textile factory that processed cotton.

Beyond that sad fact, and mention of her father, who died before Mary was born, it isn’t a smoking gun or clue to anything—just a small but nevertheless historically significant remnant of her life—or, as Steve puts it, “the only examples we’ll ever have of Mary’s voice.”

But, last night, I came across two more!

On ancestry.com, relatives have put up two postcards to Myrtle, in Mary’s writing. One is postmarked January 29, 1910—a little more than a year after her letter to Santa was published in the Atlanta Journal and she asks, “What did Santa Claus bring you?”

I wonder what, if anything, he brought “Little Mary,” as she would come to be remembered.

It’s been on my mind, haunting me this holiday season. Did the impoverished child who left school for long hours of factory work get that doll and carriage or the tea set she wanted?

How exciting it must have been, two days before Christmas, for a poor mill worker to see her name printed in the newspaper!

Four years later, her name would appear in newspapers across the country for months to come. She is forever known and remembered.

CB Hackworth, an occasional contributor to Atlanta magazine, is a longtime journalist in both print and broadcast media. His work in television has been recognized with “about” 40 Emmy Awards as head of the investigative unit at WXIA-TV, senior producer of Action News Primetime and Closeups for WSB-TV, and a 20-year collaboration with Andrew Young on a series of nationally syndicated documentaries. However, he says that on the rare occasion his name is recognized, it is for having been a columnist and editor of the weekly newspaper Creative Loafing during the late 1980s and early 90s.

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