A docent at the Museum of Haywood County History in Clyde, the house most people around here still call the Shook-Smathers House, was working her way through a group of tourists when she opened the case and lifted out an antique Bible.
Her gloves were so white against that tattered leather that I made a sound before I thought about making one. Not a word. Just the small involuntary noise a person makes when something lands. I asked if I could photograph it. A second docent carried it to a little table near a window, set it down with the care you’d use on a sleeping baby, and stepped back out of my frame without being asked.
I had my camera up before the group had finished moving through the room.
There was a pocket watch on the table beside the Bible, and the light coming through that window was hitting it the way light hits metal when it wants to make you look foolish. It was the easy picture. It was the picture that would have gotten the likes. Brass, warm, shallow depth of field, done in four seconds and nobody would have asked me a single hard question about it.
I want to be honest about that, because the honest version is the whole point of this.
I almost took the easy picture and forgot about the Bible in that moment.
Jacob Shook's Signature
What stopped me was ink.
Jacob Shook. Written in his own hand, in looping forward-leaning letters, in 1796. The kind of script they don’t teach anymore, where the pen never seems to leave the page and every letter runs downhill into the next one like water finding the low place.
The window light came across it the way Rembrandt would have staged it if Rembrandt had worked in Haywood County, raking low and warm and leaving the far side of the page in shadow. I moved maybe six inches. I let the watch go soft. I pressed the shutter all the way down and it made that soft click that always sounds louder in a quiet room than it actually is.
I have been in and out of that house for nearly three years now. I have photographed its rooms and its stairs and its antique artifacts. I could have told you Jacob Shook’s name any day of those years and told you when he built and what he built it out of.
However, He had not been real to me until that moment.
That is what studying literature gave me that no photography class ever did. The understanding that a name pressed into a page is an artifact, and that a signature is a claim. Somebody sat down with a pen and declared himself onto the record. Every object in that house is a sentence out of a story that a person lived, and my job is to read the room before I photograph it.
The Revolutionary War Solider Who Built It
Jacob Shook came into these mountains the way a lot of men did, which is to say he came in carrying a rifle before he ever came in carrying a plow.
In 1776 he and his brother Andrew marched under General Griffith Rutherford on the campaign against the Cherokee that history books call Rutherford Trace. That march is when he first laid eyes on this country here in Haywood County, NC. I think about that more than is probably comfortable, especially since we are officially in America’s 250th year.
The Pigeon River bottomland he fell in love with was somebody else’s home first, and the reason he could settle it cheaply was that a war had scrambled the treaties and a broke young state was paying its veterans in land it had promised elsewhere. That is not a footnote; it is a fact.
He came back. He married Isabella Weitzel when they were both thirty-seven, which in 1794 made them both old for it, and they settled along the Pigeon River near a place that would eventually be called Clyde.
He built his house around 1795 out of timber he felled and nails he forged. It is held to be the oldest timber-framed structure west of the Blue Ridge. The National Register of Historic Places carries the date 1810, because 1810 is the earliest year anybody can prove with paper, and the paper in question is a Methodist bishop’s diary. Local historians have been saying for decades that those walls are older than the record allows. Ask anybody in Clyde who has been in that attic.
He opened the house to his faith and to whoever needed it. Bishop Francis Asbury, the father of American Methodism, slept under that roof on the night of November 30, 1810, and wrote it down, which is how a courthouse ended up knowing anything at all. There was a chapel on the third floor before there were churches in this county to hold people. They walked miles of mountain to get to it.
And when they got there, they left proof.
Their names are on those attic walls, carved in. Not signed in a guest book that would be thrown in a drawer, carved, which takes time and a blade and the decision that you want to still be there after you have gone home.
Same instinct as the man who wrote his name in the front of a Bible.
We were here. We mattered.
What the Record Kept
Jacob Shook wrote his will in the summer of 1836 and died three years later, on the first day of September in 1839, at ninety years old. They buried him at Pleasant Hill Cemetery on the southeast edge of Clyde, where Shooks and Smathers have been going ever since. He left eleven children.
His will instructed his executor to sell everything, real and personal, on twelve months’ credit, and split the proceeds among the heirs. So over two days at the end of October in 1839 they carried his life out into the yard and sold it in lots. Farm implements. Livestock. Corn and oats and wheat. The furnishings of the house. The wares out of the kitchen. And in the middle of that list, written down by somebody with a ledger and no idea anyone would ever read it back, a bible and books.
I am not going to tell you it was the same Bible. I don’t know that, and I am not in the business of making a good story out of a maybe.
But I stood there with my camera over a page a man signed in 1796, in a house that survived being sold off in pieces, and I thought about how close every single one of these things comes to not surviving at all.
In 1833, in his eighties, Jacob Shook signed his name again, this time on a pension application. Six years before, there existed a camera anywhere on this earth capable of holding his face.
So, the signature is the photograph. It is the only likeness of him we are ever going to get, and I was standing over it two hundred and thirty years after his hand moved across it.
Before there were cameras, before there were painted portraits out here in the backcountry, before there was any technology at all for saying I was here, there was ink. There was a hand pressing meaning into a page and trusting the page to hold it.
The page held.
What Almost Wasn't Kept
Here is the part nobody puts in the brochure.
When the preservation work began on that house, it was wrapped in aluminum siding.
Two hundred years of hand-hewn timber, a chapel in the attic, the names of the faithful cut into the boards, and somebody at some point in the twentieth century did what people do, which is try to make an old thing easier to keep.
The architects had to peel the modern off it before they could find out what was underneath. Four periods of construction, buried. It took a piece of detective work and one lucky historic photograph to put back what had gone missing.
A descendant named Joseph Hall bought it in 2003, restored it, and in 2011 handed it over to the Haywood County Historical and Genealogical Society so it would stop being one bad decision away from gone.
That is what preservation actually looks like. Not reverence. Somebody’s money, somebody’s stubbornness, and a lot of siding in a dumpster.
But that is the beauty of giving history its own room to breathe and come back to life.
Memory Keepers by Danita Dodson
Danita Dodson, a poet and literary scholar out of East Tennessee, gave a name to the people who do this. Below is a selection of some of my favorite lines from her lovely poem, “Memory Keepers”, from her 2024 collection of poetry titled Between Gone and Everlasting
'We are gatekeepers who open doors to let history walk into the now… We sift through the faded photographs and recall faces we've never seen… We're buttons in a King Albert tin, tea-stained muslins in a cedar chest, brown calligraphic curves in a bible…"
Buttons in a King Albert tin. Brown calligraphic curves in a Bible. I read that and felt found out.
We are the ones who show up with a camera and a notebook and a recorder, because somewhere underneath language we understand that the story closes when people quit paying attention to it.
That is why I photograph Appalachia the way I do.
Not because it is pretty and nostalgic. Don’t get me wrong, it is pretty, but that is the cheapest thing these mountains have to offer. Pretty is the pocket watch catching the light out of the corner of my eye.
I photograph it because it is still asking. The signature in that Bible is still asking to be read. Every face I have ever lifted a camera toward has been asking, without ever once saying it out loud, for somebody to bear witness.
Studying Appalachian literature taught me that a life is a text. Photography taught me to read one with light.
The rest of it, the part nobody writes down, is only ever kept in the land, in the timber of old houses, and in the faces of people who have outlasted everything thrown at them.
My job is to find it, and to hold still long enough to press the shutter.
Sabrina L. Greene is a documentary and fine art photographer based in Waynesville, North Carolina, working regularly across Haywood, Madison, Buncombe, and Jackson County, and the mountain communities of Western North Carolina. The Museum of Haywood County History is located in the Shook-Smathers House at 178 Morgan Street in Clyde, and is cared for by the Haywood County Historical and Genealogical Society. Tours can be scheduled through the Society.
