Tag: Feature

Old House, New Look

Metamorphosis of a village showplace

By Deborah Salomon • Photographs by John Gessner

Hundred-year-old houses like Red Gables harbor mysteries, secrets. Who (or what) was Ailsa, the name on the gate shingle — a girl or the islet off Scotland? What is known about the people who autographed boards — one dated 1918 — uncovered during renovation, now framed in the kitchen? And why — in an age when Pinehurst homes had a crawl space, at best — does this house own a brick-walled basement sturdy enough to withstand a tornado?

“I kept driving by . . . I always wanted to live in the house,” says Holly Davis.

Now, she does. After 18 months of respectful renovation and new construction, the house within sight of the Carolina Hotel is once again a showplace, a comfortable family home and gallery for Southern folk art.

By the early 20th century word had spread through the Northeast that Pinehurst was a desirable winter destination for high society — and so much closer than Palm Beach. Some snow birds stayed at hotels or rented one of the founder’s, James Walker Tufts, cottages, while the deepest pockets built their own. In 1909 Mrs. Emma Sinclair of Boston commissioned architect W.W. Dinsmore, also of Boston, to build what the Kennedys might call a compound: two structures collectively named Red Gables after the clay-tiled roofs, so she could winter alongside her daughters. In 1918 the property was sold to Henry B. Swoope, a Pennsylvania coal baron.

Red Gables, along with its sister cottage and log cabin, changed hands several times, endured multiple updates, but stood empty and sad when a friend told Holly that, finally, the property was for sale.

“I was glad the house needed work,” Holly recalls. “That scared off people. I could see the potential.”

Holly grew up in Illinois, moved to Durham; her husband, Carty Davis, comes from New Orleans. They lived in Atlanta before deciding a smaller city would be better for the children. The area offered schools, culture, interesting people. In 2002 they built a residence in Forest Creek. Holly, who studied graphic design at N.C. State, enjoys building and renovating. “I can (visualize) the space when I see plans, which is helpful.” Eventually, like many transplants, they gravitated to the village. “I much prefer a historic house with so much more character,” Holly says.

This she vowed to preserve by keeping the footprint virtually intact and cherishing details, such as crystal teardrop sconces and chandeliers, oversized windows, a glass-front built-in bookcase. Instead of a spa tub, she refinished a claw-foot, original to the house. Aesthetically reluctant to convert to gas, four fireplaces trimmed in exquisite moldings still burn wood.

Vinyl trim was replaced and a fresh layer of stucco applied to exterior walls which, with the red tile roof, completed the Mission style that caused a ripple in the early 1900s. Alas, the tile roof is gone, but fat Tuscan columns — another uncommon architectural detail — remain on the porch.

Some interior space was rearranged, but not the twin entrances placed on opposite sides of the living room with its coffered ceiling — once dark wood, now painted white. Holly deemed the dining room unnecessary. Instead, she used it for a family room-den and placed a small, elegant round dining table with curved upholstered chairs at one end of the living room. Most mealtimes the family gathers around an 8 1/2-foot kitchen table made to order using lumber salvaged from Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co. warehouses.

Main floor space was also adjusted for a master suite, leaving the three upstairs bedrooms for guests.

Mrs. Emma Sinclair, the Swoopes and their nine children would gasp at the kitchen, which had been redone,’70s fashion, when the Davises purchased the house. Holly wanted everything ripped out, including the ceiling and room above it, making way for a vaulted space clad in painted wideboards, with recessed lighting. This established a scale suiting tall cabinets, a marble island and countertops, and a range hood befitting a castle, all in soothing gray and white. No tabletop appliances or gadgets break the expanse.

“I’m not a clutterer,” Holly says.

But she is a collector. “I love Southern primitive folk art,” which she encountered near the Davises’ beach retreat on Fripp Island, South Carolina. “The raw materials, the emotions — they paint about life,” often life filled with poverty and pain in the post-Reconstruction South. Her favorites include Sam Doyle, a black artist from St. Helena Island, South Carolina, who painted on scrap metal in the African-influenced Gullah tradition. Figures are flat, frontal; coloring is primary, bold. Also represented is Clementine Hunter from Louisiana’s Natchitoches Parish. Hunter, a domestic servant at Melrose Plantation who could neither read nor write, painted on any objects she could find, as well as canvas. She died in 1988, at 101, leaving a thousand visual memories of her gritty existence.

Holly successfully juxtaposed a scene by Alabama farmhand Jimmy Lee Suddeth, who used a mud-based paint tinted with berries, against a marble-topped antique chest from Carty’s Louisiana homestead. Other pieces were brought back from a family trip to Africa.

But, in truth, no period or style defines the result. Holly’s aversion to clutter extends throughout the house, which is furnished with a spare hand, allowing each piece an impact. She trolls junk stores for dressers, headboards and other pieces, paints and “distresses” them herself to resemble well-worn heirlooms. Neutrals prevail except for bursts of color — bright navy on a bedroom carpet and spread, an even brighter orange chair illuminating another bedroom, one small olive green wall in the monochromatic kitchen, sunflowers and orchids in the living room — pure panache.

Across the stone terrace stands a massive new garage with an upstairs office-apartment and balcony, designed and stucco-clad to blend with the house. When landscaping the triple lot Holly was able to retain decades-old plantings, which shield them from traffic. “But we like hearing music (from events on the green) and the bagpiper,” who serenades the hotel every evening. When the Davis children are home they walk to the Roast Office for coffee; Carty Davis and yellow Lab Charlotte are regulars in the village.

Houses, like crops, fashions and seasons, move in cycles — at least the lucky ones. Red Gables, aka Ailsa House, long a wallflower, blooms a debutante once again, this time with all-new systems and wine shelves in her cellar fortress.

Credit Holly’s patience: “I just hope what we’ve done to this home will make it last another hundred years.” PS

2017 Feature

Wintry Mix

Without warning, you alter my day —

wanting more firewood before

it becomes soggier with morning snow.

I see no reason to disembark the sofa.

Horizontal before the fireplace,

I offer you a quilt that needs no tinder —

but your posture is stern and straight.

Rising, I moan like only I can, still unconvinced.

Children sled outside, asphalt’s black spine

revealed with each pass, down the block where

we sometimes stroll comfortable evenings,

or other everyday occasions when we leave,

yet return. Warm in a wool scarf I gave you,

you emerge smiling, extending leather gloves

to fend off spiders and splinters, and seize

some oak, encouraging me to hurry inside.

— Sam Barbee

from That Rain We Nee30

Magna Carta Man

“Little old bookbinder” Don Etherington held — and preserved — history with his hands

By Jim Moriarty

Photographs by John Gessner

Surrounded by thickheaded hammers, scalpels that look like they’ve escaped from an operating theater and a cast iron vice, Don Etherington sits on a stool in his bookbinding workshop and talks about the heart attack that led to his quadruple bypass surgery as if it was a trip to the Circle K. It was a delightful, warm November day a little over a year ago. He had turned 80 a few months before. He felt a sharp pain in his chest, took a nitroglycerin pill, waited five minutes and took another. The pain didn’t go away so he called 911. His house is four from the corner. By the time the paramedics got him to the end of the road, he was gone.

From the other side of the studio, his wife, Monique Lallier, a designer of artistic book covers as highly prized as Etherington’s own, picks up the narrative. “He said, ‘You know this nurse in the ambulance, she was sooo nice,’” she says, her French-Canadian accent making the encounter in the rear of a rescue vehicle sound just slightly naughty. “I said, ‘Of course she was nice, she was happy to see that you came back.’”

Etherington laughs. “So,” he says, “this is my second time around, actually.”

The first one wasn’t half bad.

“I’m just a little old bookbinder,” Etherington says. Indeed, he is. One who has laid his hands on the 1297 Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, to name just two. And it all started with a pair of dancing shoes.

Born in 1935, living in a Lewis Trust building — flats for the poor — in central London, Etherington was a child of the Blitz. His mother, Lillian, cleaned houses. His father, George, was a painter by trade who’d been a prisoner of war for four years during the War to End All Wars and came home a changed man. “He was a hard guy,” Etherington says.

With the exception of roughly half a year when Etherington was evacuated to a house in Leeds that lacked indoor plumbing, buzz bombs and shelters were what passed for a routine childhood. “I used to roam the streets with a bunch of guys,” he says. “I’d go around at night — I can’t believe this myself — with a shopping bag and pick up all the pieces of German shrapnel. I’m, what, 5? It’s beyond imagination. The Blitz, the only time it really affected me, was when the flats got bombed. That night 73 of my school chums got killed in that one air raid. I think it was a doodlebug (a V-1 bomb). It hit the corner of our apartment block, skidded into the shelters, where a lot of people got killed, and it bounced off there into the school.

“It was like part of life. You’d hear the drone coming over and then all of a sudden, it would stop. We could tell where it was going to hit. We’d say, ‘Oh, that’s going to hit Hammersmith or that’s going to hit Kensington.’ We didn’t have that feeling that it was awful and depressing. It was our life. When you go through that, certain things don’t affect you as much. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that we were very resilient and resourceful.”

After the war, barely into his teens, Etherington did two things that would change the trajectory of his life, and he doesn’t know why he did either one. First, at 13, given a list of potential fields of study at the Central School, he ticked off bookbinding, jewelry making and engraving. He was chosen for bookbinding and off he went, still in short trousers. “I came away that first day knowing I loved it,” he says. “From that day on, nearly 70 years, I’ve been happy doing what I’ve been doing, which is very special.”

The second was those shoes.

“I took myself off the streets,” he says. At 14, he bought a pair of dancing shoes, marched into a studio in what was, to him, the fancy Knightsbridge section of London, and took up ballroom dancing. Medals and jobs came his way. He met his first wife, Daisy, when he helped open a dance studio in Wimbledon. “To this day, I don’t know how I went from strolling the streets, getting into all sorts of stuff, from that to doing dancing. The only thing I could say is when I went to Saturday cinema, I loved watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I got enamored and thought, boy, I’d love to go to America.” Etherington danced his way into his 80s, including at Green’s Supper Club in Greensboro.

After a seven-year apprenticeship in binding at Harrison and Sons in London, followed by a brief stint restoring musical scores at the BBC, Etherington took a position as an assistant to Roger Powell, the man who bound the illuminated manuscript The Book of Kells into four volumes in 1953. “I went to Roger. He said, ‘What do you know about bookbinding?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely everything.’ For the next few years he showed I didn’t know a damn thing,” says Etherington. His work with Powell and his partner, Peter Waters, was followed by a position at Southampton College of Art, where Etherington developed a bookbinding and design program in addition to producing his own designs, the artistic covers he’s created throughout his life.

In the first week of November 1966, after a period of prolonged rain and threat of the collapse of several dams on the Arno River, a release of floodwater hit Florence, Italy, traveling nearly 40 miles an hour. The Biblioteca Nazional Centrale, virtually under water, was cut off from the rest of the city. The damage was incalculable. Powell and Wright asked Etherington to join the British team being dispatched to Italy to help. “They had 300,000 books floating in the water. Before we got there these student volunteers got them out of the water, out of the mud, out of the oil and put them on a truck to be dried in tobacco kilns up in the mountains. Not to blame them because nobody knew, but it was the wrong technique. Here you’ve got covers floating all around and you’ve got books floating all around. In those days, they weren’t titled. All these scholars were having to try to match up that cover with that book with no indication other than size.”

Out of this disaster, the field of book conservation was born. “We started to talk to German, Danish, Dutch bookbinders and restorers for the first time. We started talking about different techniques. Never would anybody share secrets — including England. All of a sudden, we’re talking together around coffee or whatever. It was just a whole different mindset,” says Etherington.

For two years, he spent between six and eight weeks in Florence teaching conservation techniques to the Italians. His first trip to Italy, at the age of 31, was the first time he’d ever been on an airplane. Etherington stayed in a pensione on the Arno River whose owner looked like Peter Sellers, and his fellow lodgers included two bankers from Milan, a prostitute who didn’t talk much, and a countess who had been married to a high ranking German general in the Weimar Republic who delighted in regaling her dinner companions with personal recollections of the Aga Khan.

Etherington would, himself, hit on a previously untried technique, using dyed Japanese rice paper in mending leather bookbinding to add strength unachievable with the leather alone, an approach that’s still used. “People give him a lot of respect for being one of the early conservators,” says Linda Parsons, who joined Etherington at the founding of what would become known as the Etherington Conservation Center (now the HF Group) in Browns Summit.

Four years after the Florence flood, Etherington was asked by Wright to join him at the U.S. Library of Congress as a training officer. He spent a decade in D.C. in various capacities. Among the projects he consulted on were teaching FBI agents about printing techniques, typefaces and paper characteristics to help them reassemble shredded documents found behind the Democratic party offices at the Watergate Hotel — some of which related to the scandal itself — and preparing Lincoln’s manuscript of the Gettysburg Address for display at the Gettysburg National Military Park. As if he had nothing else to do, Etherington penned a full-blown dictionary, Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books, listing every tool, material and technique related to the field he’d help create.

From the Library of Congress, Etherington was hired to launch a conservation program at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. There he was asked by Ross Perot to supervise the care and transportation of the 1297 version of the Magna Carta.

“There’s about 17 versions in existence. The 1297 one was the version the Founding Fathers used to write the Constitution of the United States. Ross is a big collector of Americana. He bought it for $1.5 million, which was pretty cheap at the time. It was found in the archives of a family in England. I was very surprised that England allowed it out. When I saw it, it was in really, really good shape. The ink was very black. There was question whether it was legitimate. Many scholars looked at it and authenticated it but, boy, it was questionable at the time.

“When you have an early document, you have a seal — I think it’s Edward I — and a silk strap. Because of maybe packing it or making sure it didn’t hang loose, someone turned the tie and put it on the back and stuck Scotch tape on it. I know it sounds stupid but it was that way. At some point, it went up for sale. This guy bought it for $22 million so Ross didn’t do too bad.”

By 1987, Etherington had fallen in love with Monique on a trip to Finland. His sons, Gary and Mark, were grown, and he decided to rearrange his life and leave Austin. He and Monique moved to Greensboro to begin a for-profit conservation company in association with Information Conservation, Inc. It would morph into the Etherington Conservation Center. The company performed the conservation and display preparation for the Constitution of Puerto Rico. They prepared and conserved the Virginia Bill of Rights. And Etherington was asked to work on the Charters of Freedom exhibit — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights — for the National Archives as the parchment consultant on the Declaration of Independence, helping to design how the badly faded document was to be displayed. Like a sure-handed heart surgeon, one concentrates on the process, not the patient.

“A lot of people who are not in this business, they think it’s a little bit scary,” he says. “I try not to think too much about the importance of it to history or to our country or whatever, because once you start doing that, instead of treating it with surety, you’re treating it with tentative hands, and that’s the worst thing that could ever happen to you.”

Etherington’s archive resides at the Walter Clinton Jackson Library at UNCG. “He’s internationally known,” says Jennifer Motszko, the library’s manuscript archivist. “He basically was there at the founding of his field where they started to come up with systemizing ways to preserve and conserve materials. But then he’s become a well-known entity in fine arts binding. You mention him in that circle, he and Monique define that area.”

In celebration of artists and their craft, the UNC Wilmington Museum of World Cultures has designated Etherington and Lallier North Carolina Living Treasures. Etherington has worked on everything from family Bibles to a 14th century Haggadah, from first century Chinese papyrus rolls to a rare copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, from personal treasures to national ones. Still, every day at 5 p.m., studio work ceases. It’s time for the Etherington Cocktail. One part gin. Two jiggers of sweet Vermouth and a splash of tonic water.

“I’ve been very lucky doing things,” says Etherington.

Now he gets to toast a second go-round. PS

Positive Outlook

Preston McNeil met Don Etherington when the family’s Chi-Poo, Mali, a Chihuahua/poodle mix, gnawed the edges of the study Bible belonging to his wife, Brenda. McNeil, who moved to North Carolina from New Jersey in 1988, has owned businesses ranging from carpet cleaning to cookie stores, and dabbled in jewelry design. He decided he could add bookbinder to the list by taking the chomped-on Bible apart and putting it back together again.

“So, I did,” he says. “It was a book that worked.” All the new binding lacked was lettering. McNeil found a place where he could have it imprinted. When the man behind the counter made out the invoice he noticed McNeil’s address. It was the same street Etherington lived on. “He said, ‘Take this book and show Don what you’ve done,’” says McNeil. “So, I took it to Don and he goes, ‘Uh, I see some mistakes but you did pretty good.’ He invited me in. And I’ve been going to him from that point on.”

After a couple of years studying with Etherington, McNeil felt confident enough to redo a friend’s Bible. “Then I began to buy my own equipment. Now, I have a full studio downstairs,” he says. And another business, Gate City Binding. “I wish I had learned to do this when I was 36,” says McNeil, who’s actually three decades older than that. “I love it so much.”

His seven-year apprenticeship with Etherington and his new skill set led to a delicate and difficult commission, rebinding the volumes of the Pinehurst Outlook, the newspaper that published continuously from 1897 to 1961, that reside in the Tufts Archives at the Given Memorial Library. The project is being paid for entirely with donations designated for that purpose.

“The majority of the Outlooks I’ve worked with are fully separating from the original binding,” he says. “The spine is deteriorating. Everything is dry-rotting on the interior. The books are all newspapers. If they need to be restitched, they’ll be restitched. If they need to be reglued, I reglue them. Then rebuild the whole spine. It goes from individual papers to a book again. It’s building a book from scratch, essentially.”

Just like his new career is built from scratch. “I take from his mind, put it into my mind,” says McNeil of his mentor, Etherington. “I take from his hands, and I hope it’s coming out of my hands.”

2017 Feature

A Good Fit for the Goodmans

A Pinehurst family grows into well-planned home

By Deborah Salomon • Photographs by John Gessner

On the border dividing Generation Xers from millennials sits a beautiful house occupied by a matching family: young(ish), sociable, fit, bright, busy. The house is stylish yet comfy, practical and pretty — an heirloom-free zone in Pinehurst, better known for senior(ish) CEOs, globetrotters and generals, now attracting this new demographic that enjoys walking or jogging to the village after shooting hoops in the driveway.

Meet the Goodmans: Laura, from New England-prim Wellesley, Massachusetts; Kenny, whose roots extend deep into Tar Heel textile and furniture industries; Cate, 15, an avid participant in Odyssey of the Mind; and sports enthusiast Matthew, 12.

Golden retriever Ruby, and Ollie, a sweet Corgi-blend rescue, complete the portrait.

Kenny (N.C. State) and Laura (Vanderbilt) met in Raleigh. They decided on Pinehurst when Kenny returned to the family business, located in Ellerbe. Laura found the public schools fine and the village friendly: “Here, you walk into a store and everybody says hello, knows your name. That wouldn’t happen in Wellesley.”

They built an 1,800-square-foot house with white vinyl siding, green shutters and a front porch overlooking Pinehurst No. 6, where they were bombarded with stray golf balls. This didn’t work with a new baby. Time to build a forever house, designed to their specifications by Pinehurst architects Stagaard & Chao, known for parabolas and arches, niches, vaulted ceilings and the Fair Barn renovation.

But, Laura maintains, with off-white shingles, and paneled front door flanked by benches, the look combines New England with Old Town cottages commissioned by the Bostonian Tufts family. Yet those very cottages, many enlarged and restored beyond their original glory, were oblong or square. The Goodmans chose an L-wing, which creates a front courtyard, giving the house on a corner lot facing a well-traveled street more of a manor appearance. Multiple high roof pitches impart the illusion of a second story when there is none, except for an attic playroom.

* * * * * *

Whatever generational banner they hoist, the Goodmans were forward-thinkers when laying this footprint during the great Great Room Era. “I wanted three separate living spaces,” Laura says, “so when the kids want to watch TV we can close the door.” True prescience, considering the house was built in 2002, when Cate was a toddler and Matthew not yet born. Ditto placing the children’s quarters in the L-wing (with its own entrance), the master suite at the opposite end.

The smiling Goodmans welcome friends through a wide front door, into a wider foyer, then straight into the living room overlooking terrace and garden, where father and son throw a baseball. Even the living room is divided by furniture placement into two conversation areas. Architectural niches show off a pair of small antique chests, while the peaked ceiling is softly illuminated by rope lighting tucked into a cornice molding.

Opposite the living room, sunlight streams through bare windows in the dining area, where a wall indentation frames a tall red-lacquered Chinese armoire topped with oversized black ginger jars. Unobstructed access between the two rooms allows setting up long tables for holiday gatherings

Many furnishings came from a family-owned business that closed, other pieces from Pinehurst village boutiques. A velvet slipper chair in the master bedroom originated with Laura’s grandparents. Laura cannot find a word that encompasses their decor style, from a massive drum coffee table to Asian bamboo, sleigh beds and carved French provincial settees, only that the pieces relate beautifully.

“We like clean lines, no clutter,” Kenny adds.

* * * * * *

A guest bedroom in the master suite wing — now Kenny’s home office — highlights a recent palette reversal. Its unusual teal walls set off the white sleep sofa (just in case), a set of Chinese prints illustrating silk-making, bamboo blinds, a retro leather club chair, and a framed newspaper story about his grandfather, who served as Richmond County sheriff for 44 years.

“We never used this room; now we use it every day,” Kenny says.

In a daring move, they painted the wall of wood cabinetry in the master bathroom, also the dark kitchen cabinets, an unusual and soothing dove gray, adding a granite countertop pattern that swirls rather than spatters. Kitchen layout and size is a paradigm of restraint. The island expands counter space, nothing else. “I’m an electric girl,” Laura says, explaining her choice of a smooth cooktop and built-in ovens instead of an industrial gas range. She has a coffee nook and wine rack but no pastry area, refrigerated drawers or wine cellar. The chrome yellow Dualit toaster — a British award-winner used by fine restaurants — stands, statuesque, against the white ceramic tile backsplash.

On one side of the kitchen is a “sitting room” similar to one Laura remembers from an aunt’s house. Upholstery fabric there and elsewhere comes from Goodman textile manufacturing. On the other side of the kitchen, a charming corner breakfast nook with upholstered banquettes and beyond that, the TV room. With door. Family dinner is obligatory, with no electronic distractions. Off to one side, a screened gazebo awaits fine-weather dining.

Whimsy trumps classic in the guest powder room, wallpapered in ragged blue spots on white, straight off a Dalmatian.

In the teens’ wing, a long wall of built-in bookshelves serves Cate’s passion for reading. Matthew likes his room, “because I have a basketball hoop on the wall.” Cate selected colors for her sitting-bedroom, a bright turquoise that compliments her long red hair.

By sizing rooms moderately, the 4,000-square-foot total does not overwhelm, as it might if allocated to a cavernous great room or huge master suite.

“I just like how inviting and warm and light and well-laid-out my house is,” says Cate. Indeed, gleaming hardwood floors, Persian runners and area rugs, interesting architectural details, fresh colors, a convenient location with other millennials nearby, backdrops the lifestyle and leisure of a new Pinehurst demographic exemplified by the Goodmans, for whom life certainly seems good. PS

2017 Feature

Almanac

Begin Again

In many cultures, the first day of the year is considered to be a sacred time of spiritual rebirth and good fortune — a time to cleanse the soul and reopen one’s mind to the notion that anything is possible. Draw yourself a lavender salt bath. Light a beeswax candle. Indulge your senses with woodsy and earthy aromas such as cedarwood and sage, noticing how they recharge, calm and nurture you.

Be gentle with yourself on this first day of January. Celebrate exactly where you are — in this moment — and allow yourself to imagine the New Year unfolding perfectly. Look out the window, where the piebald gypsy cat drinks slowly from the pedestal birdbath. Notice the bare lawn, the naked branches stark against the bright, clear sky. Experience the beauty of this barren season, of being open and willing to receive infinite blessings. There’s nothing to do but breathe and trust life.

Breathe and trust life . . .

Slice the Ginger

The Quadrantids meteor shower will peak on the night of Wednesday, January 4, until the wee morning hours of Thursday, Jan. 5. Named for Quadrans Muralis, a defunct constellation once found between the constellations of Boötes and Draco, near the tail of Ursa Major, the Quadrantids is one of the strongest meteor showers of the year. Thankfully, a first quarter moon will make for good viewing conditions.

Speaking of Twelfth Night (January 5), the eve of Epiphany marks the end of the Christmas season and commemorates the arrival of the Magi, who honored the Infant Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Indeed it is a night of merrymaking and reverie. That said, if you’re seeking a hangover cure come Epiphany (January 6), ginger tea is an excellent and delicious home remedy.

Here’s what you’ll need:

4–6 thin slices raw ginger (more if you like a tea that bites)

1 1/2 ½–2 cups water

Juice from 1/2 lime, or to taste

1–2 tablespoons honey or agave nectar (optional)

And here’s what you’ll need to do:

Boil ginger in water for no less than 10 minutes. You really can’t over do it, so load up on ginger and simmer to your heart’s content.

Remove from heat; add lime juice and honey or nectar.

Sip slowly and allow your world to recalibrate.

Mercury shifts from retrograde to direct on Sunday, January 8. It’s time to take action. Plant the tree. Tackle your garden to-do list. And since Saturday, January 28, marks the celebration of the Chinese New Year of the Fire Rooster, a little advice from the bird: Be bold; live loud; don’t hold back. PS

2017 Almanac Feature

Small Gifts

There’s an old saying that good things come in small packages. So do amazing acts of kindness

By Jim Moriarty • Photographs by Tim Sayer

It’s the season of our better angels. But warmheartedness isn’t only expressed by that larger-than-usual tip or that unexpected check and, thankfully, it doesn’t appear just once on a calendar. Our communities are populated by the generous of spirit who give without fanfare and often go unnoticed, though never unappreciated. How fortunate are we to live in a land of small kindnesses? There are not enough pages in this magazine during an entire year to show everyone who helps with their hands or their time or their talents. What follows is a tiny slice of that circle, a sliver of grace, shown here to represent the rest. You know who your are, and so do we.

Tom Burke

Tom Burke is a specialist. He specializes in bonding.

Burke and his wife, Trudy, moved to Pinehurst from Boston 24 years ago after touring the South looking for just the right spot to retire. She was a registered nurse, and he was a salesman for a trucking and shipping company. Intending all along to work a while longer, when they got here she took a job at FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital. “I was looking through The Pilot and saw that Pine Needles Golf Club was looking for semi-retired people who could walk four to five miles a day,” says Tom. “Exercise, that’s what I wanted.” That’s what he got. Then, one day, Trudy came home from the hospital and said they were looking for volunteers to rock babies.

Fresh from the experience of rocking his own grandson, Burke was keen on the idea. “I went over and applied,” he said. “It’s wonderful. It’s really very soothing.” Of course, baby-rocking is but a tiny subset of the huge number of volunteer jobs at the hospital — and a coveted one at that — but no one does it better than Burke, who has logged 993 baby-hours since 1998. “They give me whoever’s cranky,” he says with a smile. “I get there at 2 o’clock. Get my gown on. Wash up and scrub. I sit down and they put my baby in my arms and I rock them for two hours. It’s unbelievable. I would say 85 percent of the babies are asleep within five minutes. Even the ones that have problems. You can feel it, as soon as they put them in your arms. It’s strictly the human bond. We just completely relax.”

Ken Loyd

Ken Loyd learned to play the piano as a boy in Momma Gaddis’ house in Atlanta. “I would sit down and just plunk out melodies, or try to,” says Loyd of the rickety old piano in his grandmother Kate Gaddis’ living room. “My father heard me playing two of his favorite songs, ‘Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech’ and ‘Dixie.’ I was just playing them with one finger but he thought I had possibilities.” That led to 10 years of lessons. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, Loyd took a job teaching third grade at Farm Life School, a career that lasted 33 years. The piano became a teaching tool. It’s also a gift, one he shares in the lobby of FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital’s Outpatient Registration.

Loyd began volunteering to play at the hospital shortly after the piano was donated in 2000, before he quit teaching. “I’d leave school as soon as I could because there wasn’t much point playing there after 5 o’clock,” he says. “When I did retire, I started coming in the mornings. This is a nice balance in my life. I volunteer at some nursing homes, too. Do sing-a-longs at two or three places.

“This sort of distracts people from the medical reasons they might be there,” he says. “I think it gives them a little bit of comfort, a little peace of mind. I don’t know what people’s favorite songs are, but after playing for 57 years, you do sort of know the kinds of music that appeal to people.” He’s got a playlist that’s over 300 songs long.

“I probably see more smiles than the doctors do.”

Peggie Caple

Some people help with a hammer and a screwdriver. Peggie Caple wields a deft ballpoint pen. Caple, who still lives in the house she built next door to where her parents lived in West Southern Pines, worked in the Sandhills Community Action Program in Carthage, the Moore County Schools and at Sandhills Community College, where she was the director of financial aid, retiring from the college after 21 years. A hospice volunteer for over a decade, Peggie began working with the Sandhills/Moore Coalition for Human Care six years ago screening and assessing need.

“I love it because that’s helping people who are in need in our community,” she says, sitting at a table in the basement of the Trinity AME Zion Church, another beneficiary of her service. “The applicants come in and I talk with them and see what we can do to help them. We provide food, free clothing and sometimes some financial assistance. But it has to be an emergency, a real need. We want to help them get on their feet. People who have lost jobs or for some reason their life has gone downhill and they just need a helping hand. I enjoy working with an agency that offers that helping hand.”

Christmas is her favorite time of year. “I wish we could have Christmas all the time,” she says. “People seem much nicer. A little nice goes a long way. I welcome that.”

Tom Palmquist

Sometimes stuff just needs to be done, and when it does, Tom Palmquist is your guy. After a 20-year management career in Flint, Michigan, working directly for General Motors and another 10 for subsidiaries of the Chevrolet division, Palmquist and his wife, Carol-Ann, retired to Pinewild following the recommendation of some friends from his native western Pennsylvania. “We moved here shortly after retirement, built a home and moved in May of ’02,” he says. Palmquist began volunteering at Community Presbyterian Church but got hooked on the Boys and Girls Club after just a few visits, and now routinely puts in as many as 300 hours during the course of the year.

“They’re doing a great job with kids,” he says. “They have so much energy. You go in there when the kids are in there; it’s just unbelievable. They’re working so hard to move that energy in a positive direction with all kinds of reinforcement. I just think it’s an excellent program.”

Palmquist reinforces with a paintbrush. “A lot of it comes down to painting,” he says, laughing at his handyman role. “We painted the interior of the old building, for the most part. And I painted for them down at the facility they use in Aberdeen. And repairing things. Ping-Pong tables. They had a sign out at the end of the street between the ballfields on Morganton Road. The hurricane blew it right out of its frame and broke it. So, I’m working on that. I have it at home in my garage, trying to patch it, see if I can save it and put it back where it belongs. Things come loose here and there. Shelves. I don’t know that you can call it carpentry work. I’m not an expert. And I don’t get into anything like electricity or plumbing. A flashlight with three batteries is about my limit.”

Stephen Fore

Food trucks are all the rage these days, but few ever dished up more manna than What’s Fore Lunch? When Hurricane Matthew devastated the interior counties of North Carolina, Stephen Fore, a Southern Pines native, local chef and food truck entrepreneur who got his first Easy Bake Oven when he was 5 years old, hit the road for Lumberton.

Fore got a call from Ron Scott, a local attorney who had been sending supplies to Rock Church of God. “I’m up early. I get the message at 4:30, by 6 a.m. the ball is rolling,” says Fore, who talked to store managers at Fresh Market and Lowes Foods. “Within 2 1/2 days, we started serving. We got there at 10:45 Saturday morning and by 1:30 we had delivered 650 plates. People who didn’t have power. People who were displaced from their homes. They were getting put up six to a room in a motel. So, we did a spaghetti plate dinner with green beans and yeast rolls. Coke and Pepsi donated 600 sodas.”

With the anonymous backing of a local doctor, Fore returned a week later. “We said we’d be serving by 4 o’clock. A mother with about a 6-or 8-year-old daughter and a son walk in at about 3:35. We’re doing cheeseburger, mac and cheese, green beans, yeast rolls, just another big spread. So, this mother comes in a says, ‘Is it time yet?’ Someone says, ‘No, honey, we’ll be ready in about 20 minutes.’ We’re running back there. To get food ready for 800 people in about an hour is tough. I brought some extra chicken, so I ask, ‘Can I make you a sandwich or something?’ The mother looks at me and says, ‘That would be awesome. My daughter hasn’t eaten today.’ It was 3:30 in the afternoon. I make a chicken sandwich. The little girl comes back about five minutes later, says that was the best chicken she’s ever had and she wants to know if she could have another one. I said, ‘Sweetheart, you can have as many as you want.’”

It’s a long way from over. Fore is trying to raise money by Dec.15 so the kids affected by the flood in Lumberton can have something resembling a Christmas. “They have nothing. Literally nothing.”

James Johnson

James Johnson grew up in the Bronx, New York, but in March 1971, he was in the 196th Infantry, a member of the Americal Division, fighting to stay alive at Chu Lai, a base in Central Vietnam. “We tried to get them to let us go back in the field but they wouldn’t let us go,” says Johnson, a Purple Heart recipient. “Three-thirty in the morning we got overrun but we held the hill until we could get out.”

A disabled veteran, Johnson volunteers an hour a day, making food pickups in his white Toyota truck for the Boys and Girls Club, delivering kindness in cardboard boxes. “I go to Fresh Market five days a week, pick up at 10 in the morning and I’m back by 11 o’clock. I do Outback and Bonefish on Tuesday. Every other week I do Olive Garden,” he says.

It’s all part of the plan. “Let them see that there’s more important things in life, there’s a lot of skills and jobs out there you can get,” he says. “You don’t have to do drugs. You don’t have to be around bad people. Go somewhere where you can learn something.

“Help somebody else that’s in need,” he says. “It’s like in the war, the Vietnamese people needed food. When you had extra canned goods, you would give it to them. You see how the little kids run up to you and they speak to you. You’ve got something nice, you just turn it loose. You’re not looking for anything in return. Like the Lone Ranger would do. ‘Hi-Ho, Silver. Away!’ You came to do a good deed and you took off. And that’s the way it is with me. I just come to do something good and go away. I’m not looking for anything in return.”

Richard and Inge Hester

Having moved from Jeffersonville, in southern Indiana, seven years ago to get closer to the grandkids in Carthage, Richard and Inge Hester fell in love with a little red building with a long handicap ramp. It’s the one in back of the Sandhills/Moore Coalition for Human Care, where they’ve been ringing up bargain priced treasures and necessities — not necessarily in that order — two days a week for the past six years.

“We fell in love with the Barn, if you can believe that,” says Inge.

“I do the lifting and carrying,” says Richard.

“I’m the finance manger,” says Inge. “He doesn’t really care about the cash register.”

Not all the castoffs that come through the Pennsylvania Avenue door are in, well, pristine condition. Richard pulls a vacuum cleaner out of the corner to show it off. “I took that home,” he says of his private workshop. “Cleaned it completely. Put a new bag in it. Test it. Make sure it works. I sold a Dyson this morning.”

“Twenty-five dollars,” says Inge. “You can’t beat that.”

Richard honed his skills working for Caterpillar Inc. for 33 years. “I like to tinker,” he says. “There’s a testing area back there where I test VCRs, stuff like that. Small appliances, I take home and fool with. I can’t pass a tool up. I’ve got wood lathes. An old chair comes in, take it home, fix it up. Bring it back.”

Anything that hangs around too long goes on the ‘free’ table. “If we have to haul it to the dump, then we have to pay for it,” says Richard. Money is supposed to come in, not go out.

The niche they fill is need. “There’s a lot of satisfaction in it,” says Inge. “It’s a good cause, a really good cause.” PS

2016 Feature

Almanac

How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon? – Dr. Seuss

Nature Whispers

According to Celtic tree astrology, those born between Nov. 25 and Dec. 23 draw wisdom from the sacred elder. Highly intelligent and energetic, elder archetypes are known as the “seekers” of the zodiac. Variety is this sign’s spice of life, but they’re most compatible with alder (March 18 – April 14) and holly types (July 8 – August 4).

Narcissus — aka daffodil — is the birth flower of December. Those familiar with the Greek myth know that Narcissus was a beautiful hunter who fell so deeply in love with his own reflection that it killed him. Speaking of hunters, the sun remains in the astrological sign of Sagittarius (the Archer) until the winter solstice on Wednesday, Dec. 21. Consider gifting your favorite Sagittarian with a potted daffodil, a vibrant spring perennial that carries messages of rebirth, clarity and inner focus.

December birthstones include zircon, turquoise and tanzanite — all blue, the color of communication and truth. In 2001, a 4.4 billion-year-old piece of zircon crystal was found in Jack Hills, an inland range north of Perth, in western Australia. Known as the “stone of virtue,” this ancient stone offers grounding and balancing energies to those who wear or carry it.

Kissing Bough

The ancient Druids believed that the mystical properties of mistletoe could ward off evil spirits, while Norse mythology rendered it as a symbol of love and friendship. ’Tis the season, and nothing spells romance like cutting a sprig of it from the branches of a sacred oak, apple or willow. During the early Middle Ages in England, mistletoe was used to ornament elaborate decorations made of holly, ivy, rosemary, bay, fir or other evergreen plants. Kissing boughs, as they were called, symbolized heavenly blessings toward the household. If you find yourself standing beneath one with someone you adore, consider it a heavenly blessing indeed.

Winter Solstice

As we approach the winter solstice — the longest night of the year — we look up to the planets and the stars to gain insight into the final hours of 2016. The Geminid meteor shower is expected to peak on the night of Tuesday, Dec. 13, until the earliest hours of Wednesday, Dec. 14. Although a full moon will make viewing conditions less than ideal, the possibility of sighting upward of 120 meteors per hour is reason enough to add the Geminid shower to your list of things to do this month. You’ll also want to note that Mercury goes retrograde from Dec.19–31. This will be a good time to review plans and projects. Test your soil. Think about next year’s garden, reflecting on the crops that fared well — or didn’t — in 2016. Consider waiting until Mercury goes direct on Jan. 1 to order seeds.

I Heard a Bird Sing

I heard a bird sing

In the dark of December.

A magical thing

And sweet to remember.

“We are nearer to Spring

Than we were in September,”

I heard a bird sing

In the dark of December.

— Oliver Herford, From Welcome Christmas! A Garland of Poems
(Viking Press, 1955)

2016 Almanac Feature

Home for Christmas

Worldwide religious art backdrops the holiday in Whispering Pines

By Deborah Salomon • Photographs by John Gessner

Centuries before Santa, Rudolph, Alvin and Frosty, decorating for Christmas meant festooning the Madonna, Baby Jesus and saints with ribbons and greenery. The custom endures at the lakefront residence of Emi and Colin Webster.

“Christmas is a religious holiday, after all,” Colin observes, still allowing a 13-foot tree to dominate a living room with an 18-foot ceiling.

Now, their sons grown, only one small St. Nicholas remains.

Aside from respecting the sacred, the Websters’ interest springs from art collected while living, working and traveling the globe. For openers, Emi was born in Chile of British/French/Chilean lineage, schooled in England, Argentina, Germany and Switzerland. She met Colin, of a similar Scottish/European background, in kindergarten, in Chile, where their parents had attended each other’s weddings.

“Then we went our separate ways,” Colin says. He reconnected with Emi, an advertising executive, on holiday in Spain in 1986. They married the following year, honeymooned in Wales (where the collecting began) and settled in Chile.

“Before that, I had a bachelor’s pad,” Colin continues. After marriage “I looked at life differently.” Subsequently, as an executive at Proctor & Gamble and other multinationals, Colin was posted on six continents with artifacts to prove it.

Made sense to acquire treasures, small and enormous, while employers subsidized shipping.

But with such glamorous options, how did they land in Whispering Pines, on a 4-acre peninsula jutting into Lake Thagard?

After an early retirement Emi and Colin (who had also lived in Miami) investigated places to settle. Colin’s father purchased a house in Southern Pines in 1980; Emi and Colin visited often, deciding that after 13 moves and many schools the U.S. was better for their sons’ education. They bought a home in 2001, later 100 acres with the intent to build, which they decided would involve too much maintenance. Then one day they saw a For Sale sign on the prime peninsula property and snapped it up based on the view, knowing the house could be transformed — an understatement, since Colin, bored with retirement, had become a home-builder familiar with the finest materials and workmanship, while Emi had turned to real estate brokerage.

No architect or interior designer was required to almost double the existing 3,500 square feet by extending the footprint beyond the core and rearranging interior space to suit their needs and fit their furnishings, which include two glass-topped coffee tables with turned bases made by Colin. By working round the clock, the renovation and additions were completed, unbelievably, in 30 days, while the family lived on the upper floor.

“I didn’t have a kitchen so we ate take-away for a month,” Emi recalls.

The finished product includes park-like landscaping, a saltwater pool, pool house with dining area.

Colin’s method: Never start without a plan in hand. Don’t figure out as you go. Living in the house for several years had uncovered what needed changing. Being an accomplished woodworker helped. When Colin couldn’t find the right mantel he built one.

The result appears rather formal, slightly European, described as British Colonial, with Georgian overtones and a flash of Latin fire, yet comfortable — a place where the dog can stretch out on a sofa upholstered in High Point.

“This is how we grew up, surrounded by Spanish things,” Colin says. “You develop an affinity for them.”

Their most treasured “things,” however, remain museum-quality art, with Colin and Emi enthusiastic docents: A Peruvian Madonna painted, in part, by Jesuits in the late 1600s dominates one living room wall facing an equally massive archangel over Colin’s mantel. Shelves and tables hold santos — figurines of saints common in Catholic South America. Another Peruvian Virgin Mary greets guests in the entrance hall, while a wall niche resembling a shrine displays a French Madonna flanked by Venetian lanterns.

Colin brought back exquisite Russian Orthodox icons during an era of political unrest, when their value had plummeted, also Byzantine/Greek paintings and triptychs originating in churches or monasteries.

Colin is especially proud of a 16th century Spanish bargueno, or traveling desk, with carved and inlaid olivewood drawers, that would travel with a nobleman’s retinue.

From farther east they obtained a hand-sewn Egyptian panel, brass and copper urns from an Arabian bazaar. In the family room, built-in shelves hold their collection of pre-Columbian pottery.

Persian rugs on polished cherrywood floors delineate paths from area to area.

America, their adopted homeland, has not been neglected. In his office, Colin, a Civil War buff, displays a camp chair with battle names, including Appomattox, carved into the frame; also a Union Colt musket and functioning post-Confederate “machine gun” with bullets, manufactured in 1898 — one of only 10 in the U.S.

Delft liquor-bottle miniatures representing houses in The Hague, once given to passengers on KLM, and Royal Doulton Toby face jugs from Colin’s grandmother line the shelves of a kitchen hutch.

The kitchen itself, with a clear sight line past the family dining room to the lake, is more restrained than luxury food preparation palaces. Colin added panels to the serviceable 24-year-old double Sub-Zero and used a smooth electric cooktop instead of the requisite Viking or Wolf gas range. But two oversize ovens were necessary for Christmas and Thanksgiving meals attended by family and guests, served from a dining room table with a garland running down the center, composed of berries and greenery, designed by Carol Dowd of Botanicals.

“Emi likes things that are very natural, organic,” Colin says. “We use wreathes and put tons of greenery (alongside) their stuff,” which complements the ecclesiastical mode better than glitter.

Decorating the skyscraper tree with ornaments commemorating family events, topped by an angel from Germany, takes about two days. Magnolias and fresh flowers are added before the Websters’ famous Christmas party, where the space accommodates 100 guests.

On Christmas Eve the family gathers for a traditional Argentinean breaded veal dish and mince pies imported from England. Christmas morning, Colin and Emi sleep in while the boys unload their stockings, including ones for Bantu, the dog, and Panda, the cat. Later in the day, while the surround sound system plays Christmas music inside and out, guests arrive for a turkey (sometimes ham or roast beef) dinner ending with flaming English Christmas pudding.

Decorations stay in place until Twelfth Night, Jan. 6, when they are packed and stored, leaving the Madonnas, Magi and santos on their own.

“Afterward, the house seems so empty,” Emi says. Because, although they call their home Amancay, after an Andean day lily, . . . this is a house built for Christmas.” PS

2016 Feature House

Lady of the Pines

How Southern Pines artist Doris Swett created the most enduring image of the longleaf pine, leaving a legacy of helping others in her native Sandhills

By Bill Fields

Two weeks after Pearl Harbor was attacked, on a front page dotted with war-related stories — the death of a Navy sailor from Vass, donations for the Red Cross, requests for civilian defense volunteers — The Pilot’s Dec. 19, 1941 edition looked different for another reason too.

Gone was a banner of a captain and county map inside a ship’s wheel that had been used as the newspaper’s banner for a dozen years. The nautical theme was replaced with a nameplate that better reflected the publication’s location and also added some cheer at a grim time.

“In due keeping with a festive Christmas season,” the newspaper wrote, “The Pilot this week dons a new banner heading and nameplate, especially designed for the paper by a local artist who has won fame for her etchings of long-leafed pines of the Carolinas and Florida. Miss Ruth Doris Swett, Southern Pines native and daughter of the late Dr. William P. Swett, one of the county’s pioneer builders, executed the original drawing of the pine needles, the compass and the map of Moore County which will adorn the top of The Pilot’s front page from now on.”

Swett’s creation, debuted between pleas to buy defense stamps and bonds on a paper that sold for a nickel, was a stylish upgrade from the cliché clip-art look of its predecessor. For generations of residents and visitors, the pine bough-adorned nameplate — whose map included the hamlets of Samarcand, Jugtown and Niagra — symbolized the Sandhills like Midland Road, Stoneybrook or yielding to the left on Broad Street.

That Swett could connote such an effective sense of place when The Pilot commissioned her to revamp its look 75 years ago was no surprise. She was part of one of Southern Pines’ foremost pioneering families. Weary of Northern winters, Dr. Swett and his wife, Susan, moved to Southern Pines in 1892, only five years after the town was chartered. In addition to his medical practice, Swett, a Vermont native, grew peaches, organized the Southern Pines Country Club and was a leader in Emmanuel Episcopal Church. Ruth Doris, known to family and friends by her middle name, was born in Southern Pines on Jan. 11, 1901, the youngest of five children. Two of her siblings died young: Mabel Lois was only a year old when she passed away in 1898; William Louis passed away at 16 in 1907.

After Susan Swett’s death in 1915, Dr. Swett married Grace Moseley, in 1918. “Aunt Doris was very young when her mother died, and her father was very concerned about her being by herself,” says Doris’ great-niece, Mary Ruth Prentice. Sadly, it was a short union. While Doris was attending St. Mary’s School in Raleigh, Dr. Swett died suddenly of heart failure at age 67 on April 13, 1921, as he was rousing guests from their rooms at the Southland Hotel when a fire ravaged downtown Southern Pines, destroying a block of wooden buildings.

The Medical Society of North Carolina had a meeting later that month in Pinehurst, where another Sandhills physician, Dr. W.C. Mudgett, praised Swett. “He was sincere, ethical, honorable, despising that which suggested commercialism,” Mudgett said, “forgetting himself and considering only the greatest good for his patients . . . He died in the very manner in which he had expressed the hope that his final summons might come: still active, still in service.”

Doris and her stepmother grew very close, the duo once going on a two-year grand tour of the world before the Great Depression devastated the family finances. “They were well-off, and then they pretty much got wiped out,” says Prentice, who inherited some of the poetry books her great aunt purchased on her global adventure. “Her stepmother, ‘Molee,’ we called her, was a lovely lady. She became blind, and Aunt Doris really took care of her in her last years.”

Despite the family traumas, Doris Swett developed into a serious and talented artist. She studied at Chouinard Art Institute in California and the Art Students League of New York, and under painter and lithographer Margery Ryerson and South Carolinian Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, a leader in the Charleston Renaissance. William Charles McNulty, a printmaker and editorial cartoonist, was also an influence.

Swett worked in various media but specialized in etching, The Pilot reported in a 1935 story, “after inspiring associations with George Elbert Burr in Arizona.” Burr (1859-1939) was a well-regarded American artist known for his Western landscapes who did illustrations for Harper’s, Scribner’s Magazine and Frank Leslie’s Weekly. Swett came to know Burr after he settled in the 1920s in Arizona. The desert and mountain vistas of his adopted home were frequent subjects for his drypoint, a printmaking method in which an artist scratches an image on a metal plate — often copper — with a diamond-tipped needle, or stylus.

Like Burr, Swett focused her drypoint on familiar scenes, the tall trees of her native North Carolina as well as central Florida, where she sometimes wintered and for a time taught etching at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. Swett’s art was frequently mentioned in The Pilot’s pages during the mid- to late-1930s and early 1940s. The Sandhills Book Shop sold prints of her work. “Etchings including her distinctive Pines,” read a 1938 advertisement for the store in The Pilot. “We have them in many sizes, suitable for framing, or for gift cards.”

During this period, Swett’s work was exhibited in Charlotte, New York and Boston. One of her etchings of western North Carolina served as the frontispiece for a 1936 book on Beech Mountain folk songs and ballads. That spring, her drypoint prints were part of a show at the Smithsonian National Gallery in Washington, D.C., where Swett drew high praise from critic Leila Mechlin, former longtime editor of The American Magazine of Art.

“Without restricting herself to any one kind of tree, Miss Swett has undoubtedly specialized in transcribing the long-needle pine of the South and has done it beautifully,” Mechlin wrote in the Washington Evening Star. “There is something very graceful about these typically Southern trees with their tall straight trunks and magnificently tassled heads. But they are not easy to etch, for they combine both strength and softness. Their long leaves are like needles, but against the sky they appear as soft as velvet to the touch. It is just this combination of strength and lightness that this young etcher gets in her plates — especially in prints showing single branches and plumed twigs.”

Eighty years after Mechlin’s favorable critique, Denise Baker, a Whispering Pines artist who works in drypoint and is a retired Sandhills Community College art instructor, agrees.

“Her drypoints are exceptional,” Baker says. “I feel her style was very indigenous. It was very much like a sense of place, where she was at the time. It takes physical strength to do a drypoint because you have to get the needle down in the metal but still have that fluidness of line, which she was so very good at.

“The woman had to have incredible strength to do the beautiful work in that medium,” Baker continues. “If you’re a painter, you get to watch it in progress. But when you’re working on a metal plate, until you put the ink on and it goes on the press, you don’t really know if all those hours you’ve spent are coming to fruition.”

Swett put aside her art to concentrate on caregiving and church in the post-war years, her younger relatives recalling a generous spirit.

“She was extremely kind,” says Prentice, who grew up in Red Springs. “Of the three great aunts who would come visiting, she always made you feel important — your dolls, your stories were important. She was a very elegant and soft-spoken lady, very loving. I never saw anger in her.”

Swett’s great-nephew David Barney remembers her as a quiet person, smart, with a keen sense of humor. “She had been a fine tennis player at one time,” he says, “and you could tell she had been an athlete. I didn’t spend a lot of time around her, but I admired her and wish I had known her better.”

For many years Swett lived with her stepmother and an aunt, Alice Southworth, in Briarwood, a rambling Spanish Mission-influenced house on Weymouth Road in Southern Pines that had been built as a seasonal residence for Southworth. Filled with antiques, the home had a central skylight in a sitting room but lots of gloomy corners.

“My younger brother and I loved roaming around that house,” says Prentice, “thinking we could find treasure or hidden places.”

Swett died at age 65 in Moore Memorial Hospital, on April 12, 1966, of a heart attack, two days after being admitted. She was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery alongside her parents and other family members, including her stepmother, who had passed away three years earlier. “Extremely shy and retiring,” The Pilot concluded in its obituary of Swett, “she literally devoted herself to helping others in a mission of kindness and quiet piety.” Swett’s sister, Katherine, the last surviving child, died at 80 in 1968.

Following Doris Swett’s death, her Pilot nameplate remained in use for another 33 years. In a typographic makeover of the newspaper, The Pilot replaced the Swett design starting with its Sept. 2, 1999 edition. An updated map inside a compass, sans a pine drawing, was utilized. “We’ve introduced a bolder, simpler nameplate,” wrote then-editor Steve Bouser, “taking care to preserve the flavor of the old.”

Three of Swett’s drypoints — “Florida Pine,” “The Lone Palm” and “Long Leaf Pine” — are in the Fine Prints collection of The Library of Congress. Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill has Swett’s “A Winter Park Pine” and “Via Tuscany Pines” in its collection. Several Swett prints have sold at auction in recent years for between $100 and $500. At a reunion about a decade ago, relatives chose as dozens of their great-aunt’s signed prints were divided up among family members.

“One of my cousins brought lots of pieces and we all were able to get something,” says Barney. “I’m really glad that happened, because it’s extraordinary stuff — the delicacy and form of my aunt’s work is really wonderful.”

And it appeals because of more than technique.

Says Prentice: “I was born in Pinehurst. I look at those longleaf pines, and it takes me right back home.” PS

2016 Feature

Oh, Christmas Tree!

How North Carolina became the fertile crescent of the Fraser fir

By Ross Howell Jr.

Chances are the tree you decorated for your home this holiday season is a descendant of natives in the North Carolina mountains.

The Fraser fir, Abies frasieri, owes its name to an enterprising, “indefatigable” botanist, a Scotsman named John Fraser (1750–1811). Fraser was born in Tomnacross, near Inverness, Scotland, and moved to London in 1770. There he pursued various trades before — through frequent visits to the Chelsea Physic Garden, founded in 1673 as the Apothecaries’ Garden — he hit upon his true interest, horticulture.

Fraser took up a career in botanical exploration and collecting. After returning from his first voyage to Newfoundland in 1780, he founded a commercial nursery in London to sell the plants he brought back. On later expeditions he trekked the Appalachian mountains, following Native American hunting and trading trails, becoming the first European to discover the Rhododendron catawbiense, which he was able to propagate in England, selling the plants for “five guineas each.”

During his career Fraser would travel the world, locating plants for clients as diverse as William Aiton, the director of The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, to Catherine the Great, empress of Russia. Fraser is credited with introducing his eponymous fir, along with about 220 other plant species from the Americas, to Europe. His sons continued in their father’s business, and his grandson John would be elected a member of the Royal Horticultural Society.

The firs John Fraser discovered grow wild only at high elevations — 3,900 feet and higher — in the Appalachian chain from northern Georgia to southwestern Virginia. Mature trees may reach a height of 30 to 40 feet. Their needles are flattened, like the native hemlocks growing at lower altitudes. From September through November, they bear cones upright on their branches, like candles on a nineteenth century Christmas tree.

North Carolina is the center of the Fraser fir’s habitat, and that’s important. According to carolinanature.com, trees can be found wild in nine counties of the Old North State, but in only one county in Georgia, and in only two counties in Virginia and Tennessee. That’s it.

Sadly, like our native hemlocks, Fraser firs are under attack. The number of trees in the wild is being diminished by acid rain, by air pollution, and especially by nasty little creatures called balsam woolly adelgids (whose equally nasty cousins have put native hemlocks at risk). These insects have wiped out whole stands of the Fraser fir, leaving behind only “skeleton forests” on the high slopes of the mountains.

Of course, we don’t clamber over bare rock faces on the steep pinnacles of western North Carolina to harvest Fraser firs today. Remember I said it was likely the tree in your house is a Fraser fir? Just how likely is it?

The North Carolina Christmas Tree Association notes that more than 50 million Fraser firs are grown in our state, and they represent 90 percent of all the trees grown in North Carolina for use as Christmas trees. These commercially grown Fraser firs can get hefty — as tall as 80 feet, with a trunk diameter of a foot and a half.

When you’re relaxing at home this holiday, say, just minutes before Santa’s to arrive, and you’re admiring your Fraser fir’s lights and its sweet balsam fragrance, take a moment to imagine its ancestor, high on a cold North Carolina peak, an upright cone or two pale in the moonlight, reaching toward stars so close they seem to be tangled in its wild boughs. PS

Ross Howell Jr. grew up in the mountains of Virginia, where his family usually harvested a native white pine Christmas tree from the farm woodlands, along with running cedar and spicewood berries for decoration.

2016 Feature