Cecil Brown, the Roman Coliseum and Fennel

Cecil Brown with Coliseum photograph in background

Cecil's interview was another instance of one thing leading to another. When I had interviewed his relative, Jimmy Brown, Jimmy told me that Cecil had the photograph of the Roman Coliseum in Rothstein's portrait of his grandfather, Postmaster Brown. That was my original intention for interviewing Cecil. Since with John Dodson, I had located the sign for the Nethers Post Office, I thought that adding the photograph of the Coliseum to the mix would give a re-photographic texture to my film.

Postmaster Brown   A Rothstein

It also seemed odd to me that someone who was described as poor would have such a large and wonderful photograph of the Coliseum in 1935. To my mind this indicated education and something beyond poverty. It contradicted the narrative I was familiar with, that all the mountain residents were poor and uneducated. Not to mention Postmaster Brown is posing with a book in Rothstein's photograph.

Mrs Dyer with child  A Rothstein

What I didn't know was that Cecil had guided Rothstein up into the mountians to take his photographs of Mrs Dyer and her children. This came up when I was showing Cecil, Rothstein's book of photographs. When we came to the page with the caption reading 'Mrs Dodson,' he corrected the book and preceded to tell us his story of taking Rothstein to the Dyer home. He didn't remember much about Rothstein. All he could remember was the car that he drove. He agreed to take Rothstein up into the mountains just to get a ride in the car.
That change in identification would later prove important when I went to look up the records, though I didnt understand it at the time. It would also explain Rothstein's curious edit of the this family's images. When looked at as a whole, Rothstein's images of this family tell us a very different story.

Another story came up when we got to Rothstein's picture of Fennel Corbin. The first thing Cecil said about Fennel is that he had shot a man. Its a bit of local lore that Fennel shot and killed a Dodson boy. Everyone seems to have their own version of this story, even Pollock, the owner of Skyland. Cecil's version seems to combine two stories of shootings in Corbin Hollow as Fennel couldn't have been old enough to serve in the Civil war. Yet Cecil's version tells much about Fennel's reputation in the community. Fennel's family seems to have been the poorest in the neighborhood and his neighbors had various responses to that poverty.

Fennel as photographed by Rothstein

Fennel from A Trip to Skyland

What was intriguing to me was how much media attention Fennel's family got for their poverty. They were featured in the film, Trip to Skyland and Shenandoah National Park. They were at the center of the book, Hollow Folk. The Park photographed them both before and after Rothstein's visit and there are even audio recordings of the family made in 1937. Not to mention the newspaper articles in The Washington Post and the New York Times. That Rothstein spent most of his time photographing just this extended family clearly wasn't accidental. It was more likely preordained. The key to this media attention of course was Miriam Sizer.