Overlooking west Marietta today is a beautiful sandstone Italian-style villa known to many tourists as the Putnam Villa or better known to Marietta residents as The Anchorage. The home was originally built in 1859 by Douglas Putnam for his wife Eliza who only lived there for three years. The home was later purchased by Edward MacTaggert, a wealthy oil man who owned oil wells in Oklahoma. After MacTaggert’s death, the home was willed to his sister Sophia MacTaggert Russell who was said to have left most of her estate when she died to Marietta College. Other owners of the home included the Knox family who were shipbuilders in Marietta. They purchased the home in 1896.
 

In the late 1940s and early 50s, the 22-room villa became home to the famous author Dorothy James Roberts, who was born in West Virginia in 1903 and educated at Barnard College in Madison, Wisconsin specializing in medieval studies. She was the daughter of a West Virginia oil producer and author of 14 best-selling books. The most popular of her books was "The Enchanted Cup" published by Doubleday in 1953. It was one of the first books to be offered by the Doubleday Book Club.
 

Among other works Dorothy Jane Roberts wrote while in Marietta included "Lancelot My Brother", "A Durable Fire", “Kinsmen of the Grail”, “Return of the Stranger”, “Mountain Journey”, and others.
 

In 1961, Dorothy James Roberts was hailed in New York Times as one of the finest historical novelists of all time with her rendition of "Fire in the Ice", which was published in 1961 and based on an Icelandic saga.
 

In 1964, at the age of 61, Dorothy Jane Roberts retired from her writing career and moved from Marietta to Palo Alto, California where she died in 1990 at the age of 96. She was survived by a twin sister - Anna Crane of Denver, Colorado.
 

Readers, to add to this story, in 1959 when our family moved from West Virginia to Marietta to work on the vegetable farms in the Devola area, we lived on Fort street in Harmar. The Victorian home is torn down now and has been replaced by an apartment complex. I was 13 yrs old and remember riding my bike up to the Anchorage and riding back down off the hill. I would sometimes wonder who lived in that big old mansion on the hill. Had I known I was going to write this article 50 years later, I would have stopped and got Dorothy Jane Roberts autograph. I remember a light coming on in the downstairs of the mansion every night where it stayed on well into the night. Do you suppose Dorothy was writing her next best seller? I believe she was.