Back Story

The story of The Collection:
In the early 1890’s a girl was born in the mountains of North Carolina near the spring known as Dan Springs. Her mother and sister spun and wove linsey-woolsey and they with her father and brother farmed. Mary Lydia Tabor grew up up the hollow from the source of clean clear water, along the banks of Brush Creek. And counted the days until she could leave those Smoky Mountains behind. She eventually moved with her husband to south Georgia, to the town of Patterson, where they farmed, worked as railway agents in depots along the railroad tracks, and raised their family. In the mid 1930’s Mary Lydia Tabor Lewis talked her husband into building a summer house in those same Smoky Mountains, just up the road from Dan Springs. And ever after, she and her children, and then grandchildren, and then great grandchildren headed to the Tabor-Lewis mountain house for the summers. This Collection brings together various artistic efforts of grandchildren and sisters Donna Kay Schumaker Mercer and Catherine Sue Schumaker Tyler, and assorted relations.

The profit from the Collection goes to help maintain the Tabor Lewis Mountain House. A bit about the house:
The non-profit corporation, Tabor-Lewis Mountain House, Inc., operates, maintains, and holds title to the house and real property, known to the family as the Mountain House Property, for the use and enjoyment of the heirs of Mary Tabor Lewis. The property, located on Brush Creek in Swain County, North Carolina, has been in the Tabor family for over 150 years.

From a history of the house by Martha Louise Lewis Hudgins:
The Tabor-Lewis Mountain House was built as a summer home in 1934 from timber cut on the site and sawed into boards at a saw mill on the nearby creek. You can still see footprints on the ceiling where the workers stepped on the boards as they built the house. All of the windows, doors, bathroom fixtures, beds, rocking chairs, dining room chairs, original living room furniture and tin for the roof was purchased through Sears, Roebuck & Company catalog and delivered out from Bryson City. The house was built with wiring for electricity. However, power had not come through the area. The original plan was to generate electricity with a generator installed in the creek, but that didn’t work. So the family used a kerosene stove and kerosene lamps at night, and everyone went to bed early. Finally the power came and all were thrilled to have lights and an electric stove. The descendents of William Jesse Lewis and Mary Lydia Tabor Lewis, who planned and built the Mountain House, now number 70 or more.