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In 1890, Margaret Morley, a well-known biologist, writer, and educator, visited the mountains of North Carolina. She was so enchanted by their pastoral beauty and charm that she spent over a decade exploring the region, recording scenes of everyday life in captivating photographs and delightful prose. Her documentation culminated in her book The Carolina Mountains, originally published in 1913.
The Carolina Mountains is a combination of travelogue, biological observation, history, and photography. Morley toured widely through areas of upstate South Carolina and Western North Carolina, traveling by train, horse and buggy, horseback, and on foot. Her skill with a camera, her background in botany, and her ability to befriend the tough, independent mountaineers helped her create one of the most descriptive and poetic accounts of the region.
Influenced by her Victorian sensibilities, Margaret Morley presents a unique historical perspective on the region. Her descriptions of the early settlers, early education in the mountains, local speech, the Biltmore Estate, Flat Rock, and the Great Smoky Mountains thoughtfully capture the essence of the area as she experienced it in the early twentieth century.
Even today, we can trace Margaret Morley’s travels throughout the region, from Caesar’s Head to Asheville, Tryon to Cashiers. Her detailed descriptions of Mount Mitchell and Roan Mountain still ring true. With very few exceptions, the detailed and accurate account of her journeys makes The Carolina Mountains a reliable guidebook nearly a century later.
Coinciding with a year-long celebration of Margaret Morley’s photography ("The Carolina Mountains: Photography of Margaret Morley") at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, Bright Mountain Books’ 2006 Historical Images reprinting of The Carolina Mountains is enhanced with over 60 pages of Margaret Morley’s photographs.
"...a most useful and enduring guide book....The text is historical, descriptive, and anecdotal, and has the compelling
charm of utter familiarity."
— The New York Times, November 30, 1913
"To read her graceful pages will surely fill many a dweller of the plain with eager desire to follow the highways and byways
of the Appalachians and to climb their windswept heights."
— Atlantic Quarterly, January 1914
"No possible beauty of the Blue Ridge or Smoky Mountains is omitted."
— Literary Digest, November 15, 1913
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Margaret attended Oswego Normal School, then transferred to New York City Normal College, now Hunter College, where she graduated in 1878. Afterward, she pursued postgraduate studies at both Armour Institute in Chicago, now the Illinois Institute of Technology, and at Woods Hole Marine Laboratories in Massachusetts.
Margaret Morley made a career for herself as a classroom teacher, but she made a lasting name for herself as a writer. She wrote eighteen books on nature topics for children, promoting the understanding and conservation of nature and wildlife. She illustrated many of her own books with detailed drawings that are both scientifically accurate and whimsically engaging. Many of her books were adopted as nature studies textbooks in schools.
Margaret was part of a community of New England authors, artists, and actors who often met for intellectual discussions. In Hartford, Connecticut, Margaret gathered with such notables as Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dudley Warner, and William Hooker Gillette. There she also met Amelia Watson, the painter and photographer whose watercolor cover art, endpapers, and frontispiece would adorn the original Houghton Mifflin edition of The Carolina Mountains.
In 1890, Margaret and Amelia traveled south to visit William Gillette, who some years earlier had stopped in Tryon, North Carolina, to change trains and was so taken with the place that he built a home there. Tryon at the turn of the century was a thriving place for artists, perhaps especially for creative women. With its mild climate, scenic surroundings, and freedom from the bustle of urban life, Tryon offered an idyllic setting for writing, painting, and other artistic pursuits. Margaret spent considerable time there during the 1890s, traveling widely through the region and taking the notes and photographs that would become The Carolina Mountains.
In 1900, Margaret Morley completed her first book for an adult audience, Down North and Up Along, a travel memoir of a trip to the maritime provinces of Canada. Afterward, she finished The Carolina Mountains and saw it published by Houghton Mifflin in 1913. She continued to travel worldwide, but settled in Tryon, North Carolina. In 1915, she bought a home there with her friend Annie Constance Snow. Their home on Melrose Avenue is no longer standing, but Margaret’s studio still exists.
Margaret and Constance sold their property in Tryon in 1920 during a period of failing health. Constance subsequently died in 1921. Margaret died from complications following emergency abdominal surgery at Garfield Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., on December 12, 1923. She was sixty-five years old.