JAN KARON AND THE VERY CURIOUS "LOVE VALLEY" (Cheri)

As I mentioned yesterday, the big draw of my trip yesterday was a joint presentation by the author Jan Karon and quilter Georgia Bonesteel in the town of Hudson, North Carolina.

I, and a few others who came, were surprised to learn that the presentation had been at last year's "Quilting as Arts" show, but there was a nice film presentation to watch.

Jan Karon's 14 Mitford books were New York Times bestsellers, beginning in the 1990's.  I listened to almost all of them as audiobooks as I traveled to meet with clients across Northern California.  Their setting was much like Hudson, or Blowing Rock, where Karon moved to devote herself to writing. 

Karon has established a museum of her early life in Hudson, and professional life, in the classrooms where she first attended school.  The school has been converted to the The Hub Station, a place to celebrate artists.  I loved the sweet map of Mitford that hung outside the museum:

I knew that Karon had left a very successful advertising career to write, so I was interested when a friend told me that she had based her books on the northwestern region of North Carolina.  From Wikipedia:

Before she was 4, her parents split up and left her with her maternal grandparents on a farm a few miles from Lenoir in Hudson, North Carolina. Her mother Wanda,
who was 15 at Jan's birth, went to Charlotte. Her father, Robert Wilson,
joined the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Here is a picture of the house, and Karon's description of her first day there:

There was an iron kettle in the museum, but the picture beside it, of one in use, was more evocative:

The rest of Wikipedia's description of her early life really surprised me:

At age 12, Jan moved to Charlotte to rejoin her mother . . . . She dropped out of school
in ninth grade, at 14, and married Robert Freeland in South Carolina, where girls
her age could do so legally. Freeland, who was five years older, worked at a
Charlotte tire store, while Jan worked in a clothing store.
At age 15, she gave birth to her only child, Candace Freeland.

Jan and Freeland's marriage was troubled from the beginning, and tragedy rocked it further.  While Freeland was sitting in a car with one of his brothers and one or more friends,
a gun was handed through the window and went off. The bullet punctured one of
Robert Freeland's lungs and chipped his spine, nearly killing him and leaving him paralyzed.  Jan was distraught, the marriage suffered, and she filed for divorce.

Karon put a better spin on it at the museum:

Quite a lot to overcome, but overcome she did!

Mark and I try to never travel the same twice, so I checked the map before leaving Hudson.  If I were to zig and zag a bit, I could see Love Valley.  I'd seen it in the atlas before, and it always intrigued.  First there is the name - what is that, a commune? - and then it's really a dead-end off a lightly-traveled two-lane highway.

"Cowboy Capital"?  Or, as its web site says, "an authentic western town"?

Driving in from the highway, I developed many theories for what supports the town:

• poultry farm (nope, apparently abandoned),
• lumber (possibly still operational),
  
• religious retreat,
  
• dude ranch,
  
• retirement retreat for the type who like alpine and geodesic houses,
• none of the above . . . cover for drug dealers?

Everything is crammed together, so really hard to tell.  I should say that the structures and stuff are, but not so much the people.  Population is about 154 souls.

Just before I hit the literal end of the road, I saw this lady coming towards me:

She offered that she was "living her best life," and I asked if I could take her picture.  (I think her skirt was like that beforehand.) 

She said that the stores might be open later tomorrow, and invited me to the concert that they were giving the next night.  At this point, I was still thinking commune.

I got this picture out my front window before I backed up and started heading back to the main road:

This is definitely something to bring Mark back to!

One of the fun things about blogging is that I can't stop, and when I write about what we've done, I always have to find out more.  Even if that weren't me in general, I'd definitely have had to look further into Love Valley.

Some of the town's history, from its web site:

Love Valley is an authentic western town situated in the foothills of the
Brushy Mountains north of Statesville, North Carolina. Love Valley is a boy's dream and a man's reality. Andy Barker always dreamed of living in a western town. So, at the age of 29 Andy left his lucrative general contracting business in Charlotte and moved his family to his new land in April of 1954.  [He and his young family] moved to a little one-room shack.
Andy used his crew from JA Construction Company, owned jointly with his father,
to build the town of Love Valley.

OK, kinda normal.  But then . . .

 In 1970 Love Valley had a rock festival in which the Allman Brothers Band headlined. This brought over a hundred thousand people to the small town--some of whom still remain.

and . . .

In 1988 Love Valley's leather smith Joe Ponder was inducted into the
Guinness Book of World Records for having the world’s strongest teeth.
Love Valley was promoted even further when Joe was featured in
Ripley's Believe it or Not. He appeared on the David Letterman Show
and then traveled the world to perform his feats.

Apparently there a lot of western-themed events, though mostly in the summer, not my favorite time for outdoor activities here.

I absolutely  should have led with this, but I had written most of the post before I discovered it.  The absolute best resource I found was the article "Love Valley," by the documentary producer Michaela O’Brien, in Southern Cultures.  Southern Cultures is a journal published by the Center for the Study of the American South, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (yep, a mouthful).  Funny, yet reflective on the conflict between intentions and carry-through, words and action.

It was in the article that I discovered that yes, it was Lyndon Johnson standing in a wagon in a picture taken in Love Valley that I had seen elsewhere.  The article is a must-read, and I immediately subscribed to Southern Cultures, and will be looking for more of Ms. O'Brien's work.

Love Valley is included in Wikipedia's List of American Utopian Communities.