Margaret Morley
1858 - 1923
Chicago, circa 1880
courtesy Polk County Historical Association
Before the more famous art photographers Bayard Wootten (1875-1959) and Doris Ulmann (1884-1934), Margaret Morley portrayed the mountain people of North Carolina with beauty and sensitivity. Her style is akin to Emma Stowell, Emma Coleman, and Wallace Nutting who were doing carefully composed, nostalgic and consciously artistic photography in New England before 1900.
Margaret Morley came to Tryon with painter Amelia Watson in the 1890s. They resided their first year at “Thousand Pines,” the cottage belonging to playwright William Gillette. In Hartford’s important Stowe-Day collection is an album of Morley’s photographs documenting that place and period, her gift to the Gillettes. By the end of the decade, Morley had her own home in Tryon. Autumn, winter, and spring each year—unless she was away on one of her foreign trips—she spent in Tryon writing, traveling, and photographing the region. Usually traveling on foot or horseback, seeking out remote unspoiled locales alone, Morley got to know her photographic subjects intimately. She enjoyed staying overnight in mountain cabins. It is remarkable to consider that some of the most beautiful and sympathetic pictures of Southern Highlanders were made by this worldly woman from Boston.
The Three Graces
[Probably Polk County N. C.]
courtesy North Carolina Museum of History
In her intense love of the land and her fierce independence, Morley shared many sentiments with the mountain people. She also sympathized with the moonshiners. Their trust in her was so great that they allowed her even to photograph their stills. She extolled traditional crafts and was an avid collector of local pottery. Esthetically she preferred above all others the jugs of a Black potter named Rich Williams. Morley photographed him at work, and writes “Rich’s jugs are homely, but one likes them, they are so honest. A jug made by a potter who dug the clay out of the bank with his own hands, and soaked it, and ground it, and shaped it, and glazed it, and baked it, must be a wholesome sort of jug to have in any house. We had formed the habit of setting groups of Rich’s jugs in the fireplace, partly to heat the water, and partly for the picturesque effect, long before we knew of the ebony hands that moulded them. . .”
Her photographs now are becoming more appreciated and known. A trove of them was acquired by the state of North Carolina in the 1940s, probably a gift of Edith Watson, Amelia’s sister, a noted photographer who may have taught Morley the craft. From internal evidence this author concludes that the Morley images of Western North Carolina constitute a body of work predating 1905. Morley selected some to illustrate The Carolina Mountains (Boston, 1913), a landmark in the region’s belles lettres and her only book illustrated by her own photographic art.
Morley authored many other books. Little Mitchell, The Story of a Mountain Squirrel is a semi-autobiographical tale of a foundling squirrel, rescued and nurtured as a pet. (In fact Morley was famous for walking about Tryon with a pet squirrel in her pocket.) She wrote Donkey John of the Toy Valley about a trip to the Tyrol, and Down North and Up Along about a jaunt with Tryon friends around Nova Scotia. In her own time, Morley’s greatest national literary fame derived from her many charming educational books, published by McClurg in Chicago, about science—specifically her series for children about reproductive biology. Among them are A Song of Life (1891), The Renewal of Life: How and When to Tell the Story to the Young (1906), and The Bee People (1899). The royalties paid her well, and her many titles filled the previously unmet need of parents and teachers for “birds and bees” materials, at a time when the nation rapidly was becoming urbanized. The publishers used other illustrators for some, but Morley herself illustrated most of these books. Her line illustration is unpretentious, yet appealing and artful. Her style reflects the era’s trend away from the elaborate decorative work of the late 1800s toward the more informal and stylized illustration typical of the early 20th century.
The Bee People
(Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1899)
text & illustrations by Morley
She usually summered in the Northeast. In Massachusetts, she spent time at Wellesley and at Annisquam, a hamlet of Gloucester where many others of her kind migrated. They in turn were guests at the unpretentious Tryon home she shared with Miss Constance Snow, on Melrose Avenue. That residence was razed after their deaths and replaced by the elegant Kale house, but Morley’s old study/studio is extant at the rear of the property. In her time it offered a panoramic view of Tryon Peak, and close access to the many roads and trails, through Gillette Woods and beyond, so delightful for walks through nature by foot and on horseback. In The Carolina Mountains her descriptions of the vicinity are glowing. She never refers to Tryon, even in the index, by its actual name. Instead she calls the town “Traumfest” which she translates from German as “Holiday of Dreams.” This literary motif has been occasionally alluded to by subsequent authors writing about Tryon, but the moniker never really stuck — no doubt because German went out of favor the year after the book was published, when war broke out in Europe.
The Sorghum-Cutter
The Carolina Mountains
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913)
Margaret Warner Morley grew up and was educated in Brooklyn, New York. During the period it was America’s fourth largest metropolis and a hotbed of liberalism. Blacks attended public schools unsegregated from Whites, and Brooklyn was known as a major center for the women’s rights movement. Morley was a suffragette. After graduating in 1878 from New York City Normal College with a degree in education, she pursued her interest in biology at Armour Institute, Chicago, and at the marine laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass. She taught in Kansas, Wisconsin, and in Chicago. She lectured on nature studies in Boston and it was there that she forged friendships with many influential, progressive people such as Lyman Abbott, Edward Bok, and the family of Henry Demarest Lloyd. She was close to Grace Channing Stetson, wife of artist and critic Charles Walter Stetson. One of Morley’s most famous friends was John Burroughs, conservationist and author. During his sojourns in Tryon he was a living icon, wandering about with his long white beard and quirky gait.
Miss Morley was a generous supporter of the library and intellectual programs of The Lanier Club, the athenaeum in Tryon that permitted only women as voting members during her lifetime. She lived to see women receive the right to vote in national elections, but by the year of her death the nation had legislated national Prohibition.
