Margaret Morley

Below a photograph of a mountain cabin:

“Because the Northern Mountains are so cold and barren, the people live down below and look up to them. Here the people live among the mountains themselves. They love them, and are afraid to go down to the country that lies level below, because, they say, if you go out of the mountains you die. And truth to tell most likely you do.”

Below a photograph of a road in the woods:

“Whether alone or companioned, you must never walk right on. You must linger along and listen attentively, and sniff the air for news, and you must look, not only at the clouds and the blue of the sky, at the distant landscape and the colors of the near slopes, but you must look at the ground. For there also you will find things to remember when the doors are shut on the wander-life.”

Below a photograph of the Blue Ridge Mountains:

“The Blue Ridge! What mountains ever offered themselves to the sun so enchantingly as the long curve of the Appalachian chain.… This battlement of heaven was not named by accident. It was named Blue because there was no other name for it. It is blue; tremendously, thrillingly blue; tenderly, evasively blue. And the sky that contains it is also entrancingly blue.”

Culled from placards at the Charlotte Museum of History's exhibit “Photographs of Margaret Morley.” Quotations are presumably from Morley's 1913 book, The Carolina Mountains, though perhaps they are from letters or some other such source.

Here are some pictures of the exhibit.