Mary Frances and The Colony

Mary Frances Corbin in her home

Finding Mary Frances was another one of those stunning discoveries that came to define Rothstein's First Assignment. At this point in my interviews, the aspect of eugenics was starting to loom large. There was Steven Fender's article in the book, Popular Eugenic's of the 1930's that stated the resemblance of the book, Hollow Folk with prior eugenic writings.  Many of Rothstein's subjects were featured in this book and it didn't seem to make the break with eugenics that it claimed.  Then there was my interview with Jesse Meadows, a man who had been sterilized as a boy and was from what is now Shenandoah National Park. His story indicated that many children from the mountains had been sterilized.   I had even been told by a scholar that one child in Rothstein's cover image of the Nether's Post Office had been sterilized.

But I hadn't quite figured out how Rothstein's assignment figured into all of this. There was a strong resemblance but no direct connection.   Jesse was from Dark Hollow and didn't recognize anyone in Rothstein's photographs. Rothstein hadn't gone over to Dark Hollow.  While the one child in Rothstein's Post Office image could have just been a coincidence.  

But I noticed that Mary Bishop had also written about a woman with the same maiden name as the family who was at the center of Rothstein's assignment. Though it was a fairly common name and I didn't have any real reason to believe that she was connected,  I was willing to take a chance.  Call it whatever you want but I sensed a connection.  So Katrina Powell and I traveled to Lynchburg to meet Mary Bishop one Saturday and see if we could find Mary Francis Corbin.

Mary Frances

At first even  Mary Bishop was doubtful we would find her.  She hadn't talked to Mary Frances for awhile.  When she first interviewed her, Mary Frances had lived next to Jesse Meadows with other former Colony residents.   In her interview of Mary Frances for the Roanoke Times, Mary Bishop had reported that she had been sterilized as a child.  It was a disturbing story.  Sent to the colony at age 7, Mary Frances was just 13 when she was sterilized.  As Mary Bishop reported, the operation had almost killed her.

Mary Bishop

Since that interview,  Mary Frances  had moved away and Mary Bishop wasn't sure if she had the right address.  For a time we wandered around the parking lot of where we thought her building was.  It felt like we were going in circles.    Eventually we figured things out.   After making a call and then scrambling to get permission from her caretaker,  we were able to find Mary Frances and start our interview. 

At this point in the project, in addition to Rothstein's images, we carried the Corbin family chart as published in Audrey Horning's book, In the Shadow of Ragged Mountain.  Katrina Powell, being a scholar and Professor at Virginia Tech, thought it was  the important to bring it along.  I was skeptical.  I  felt we were repeating the routine of the eugenicists.  The last thing I wanted to do was to chart  Mary Frances's family history.  After looking at the eugenicists family trees,  I wanted to stay away from all of that.   In the end I would learn that was exactly what we wanted to do if we were to understand things.  Katrina was right, we needed to know where Mary Frances fit in.   

"The Colony"

At the beginning of the interview we thought it was another wild goose chase.  Mary Frances was not in good health.   Though she was alert mentally and she could clearly understand us, we often couldn't understand her.  We had to ask her the name of her parents more than once before we understood what she was telling us.  It didn't help matter much that she wasn't recognizing the people in the photographs at first either.  Though her story was important, it didn't seem to fit in with Rothstein.

Then Katrina asked Mary Frances one more time who her parents were.  We understood her this time. When we located them in the family chart we were stunned.  Mary Frances was directly related to the family Rothstein has spent so much time photographing.  The man at the head of the family was her grandfather, her father's father.  Rothstein had spent a lot of time photographing him.  In fact it seemed Rothstein had photographed everyone from Mary Frances's grandfather down to her aunts and uncles and even her cousins.  There was even a good chance he had photographed her, though she would have been a baby at the time and Rothstein did not identify many of the children in his photographs.

The full realization of what this meant would come a few days later.  Later in the week I received an email from Mary Bishop.  She told me that Mary Frances was stirred  by the pictures we had shown her and that she wanted copies.  She was starting to remember her days in Madison and she wanted to have copies of the pictures to look at again.  

When I started going through Rothstein's archive to make her copies,  it was  then that  I comprehended how closely related the majority of Rothstein's subjects were.  Rothstein's archive on this assignment was essentially Mary France's family album. Most of Rothstein's photographs were of her family.  This realization was all the more stunning since Mary Frances didn't have any family photographs in her home.  Her life had been so disrupted, she hardly knew who her family was.