Authors: Muriel Earley Sheppard, Bayard Wootten (Photographer), John Ehle
ISBN-13: 9780807843284, ISBN-10: 0807843288
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press, The
Date Published: September 1991
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Muriel Earley Sheppard (1898-1951) was born in Andover, New York. She is also the author of Cloud by Day: A Story of Coal and Coke and People.
Bayard Wootten (1875-1951) was an artist and photographer who maintained studios in Chapel Hill and New Bern, North Carolina. Her photographs appeared in a number of books, including Backwoods America.
In 1928 New York native Muriel Earley Sheppard moved with her mining engineer husband to the Toe River Valley an isolated pocket in North Carolina between the Blue Ridge and Iron Mountains. Sheppard began visiting her neighbors and forming friendships in remote coves and rocky clearings, and in 1935 her account of life in the mountainsCabins in the Laurelwas published. The book included 128 striking photographs by the well-known Chapel Hill photographer, Bayard Wootten, a frequent visitor to the area.
The early reviews of Cabins in the Laurel were overwhelmingly positive, but the mountain peopleSheppard's friends and subjectsinitially felt that she had portrayed them as too old-fashioned, even backward. As novelist John Ehle shows in his foreword, though, fifty years have made a huge difference, and the people of the Toe River Valley have been among its most affectionate readers.
This new large-format edition, which makes use of many of Wootten's original negatives, will introduce Sheppard's words and Wootten's photography to a whole new generation of readersin the Valley and beyond.