Useful Work: Photographs From Hickory Nut Gap Farm
Center for Documentary Studies exhibit showcases a place 'with a time-capsule quality'
Ken Abbott's photographs emphasize the work that has continued on the farm through five generations.
On a honeymoon trip to western North Carolina in 1916, Elizabeth and Jim McClure visited a place then known as Sherrill’s Inn; they were entranced, so much so that they purchased the inn and surrounding land, rechristening it Hickory Nut Gap Farm. A hundred years later, the “Big House” and property remains a vibrant home and community hub where five generations of McClures and extended family have visited, lived, and worked the land.
Photographer Ken Abbott first visited in 2004 on his daughter’s class field trip and was as taken with the site as the McClures had been decades earlier. “The place had a time-capsule quality,” he writes, “but it was clearly no museum—there were signs of a busy contemporary life, with a story of its own to tell. . . . It was a beautiful setting, rich in lore, and I looked forward to coming back with my camera.”
Abbott’s photographs, taken between 2004 and 2009, are on display in an exhibit in the Juanita Kreps Gallery at the Center for Documentary Studies.
The images document the objects and actions of day-to-day life at the Big House and land—the pasture during a January 2007 snowfall (above); rugs hang over a fence to dry; flowers and eggs are gathered; a battered silver pitcher that belonged to Elizabeth McClure, still used every day to bring water from the springhouse, sits on the kitchen counter.
The photograph of the pitcher, part of Elizabeth McClure's wedding silver, distilled for Abbott “one of the great lessons” of his time at Hickory Nut Gap Farm: “that we should honor beauty and our past and reach for intimacy with our given place. Like a camera lens the pitcher focuses the family story. Yet in the photograph of it, we are also reminded that there are dishes to wash and work to do.”
Above, Amy Ager and a farmhand on a four-wheeler at Hickory Nut Gap Farm. Amy and Jamie Ager started Hickory Nut Gap Farm's natural meats business in 2003. Below, Annie Ager, Jim and Elizabeth McClure's granddaughter, sits at the kitchen table in front of a wall of artwork and photos.
The photos are also featured in the book Useful Work: Photographs of Hickory Nut Gap Farm (Goosepen Studio & Press, 2015, with essays by Ken Neufeld). The exhibit will be on display at CDS until Sept. 10. For more information, call 919.660-3663.