Both the field and the data are latin1.
Here is one of _many_ online Ascii charts (close to, or identical to latin1):
http://ascii-code.net/#tab2 . Notice the entry for hex E9.
In utf8, you would see two bytes: C3 E9
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00e9/index.htm
So, depending on whether you _want_ to deal with latin1 (like E9) or utf8 (like C3E9) in your PHP code, you can user or skip
mysql_set_charset('utf8'); or mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8');
As long as you achieve that, the trancoding will be automatic.
Have you considered switching to mysqli_* (instead of mysql_*) API in PHP? It may have the issues solved. (Sorry, I can't be more specific.)
mysqli_* is very similar to mysql_*:
http://us2.php.net/mysqli
but is not available on older versions of PHP.