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A Home on Wilder Shores
Written By: Deena Bouknight | Issue: 2021/09 – September
Local author Susan Posey walked the miles of her ancestors to deliver A Home on Wilder Shores.
In order to write her debut book, A Home on Wilder Shores, local author Susan Posey walked in the footsteps of two many-times-great aunts, who are the main characters in the novel. In fact, research took Posey – along with her husband, Bill Jacobs, author of the non-fiction book, Whence These Special Places? to Wales, where the great aunts were born, and to the Rhys’s (on her mother’s side) 12th century castle.
“We saw the stone effigy of our Rhys ancestor, who built the castle, a ruler in Southern Wales,” said Posey, who spoke in July at the Hudson Library in Highlands. The couple also visited The Wales Botanical Gardens to learn the herbal recipes the sisters would have known in the 18th century. She wanted to truly understand the origins of the two sisters, who immigrated to America and were “herb-women,” who collected medicinal plants in the 1750s on their way to the North Carolina frontier. In the book, sisters Ardath and Gwyn arrived in Philadelphia, after traveling by ship and losing their father to smallpox during the journey, and they traveled alone down the path that became the Great Wagon Road. Posey also decided to spend time traveling what was the “road” – and is now a series of byways and highways – that extended through the Great Appalachian Valley from Pennsylvania to North Carolina. She stopped at historic sites, took copious notes, and tried to see, feel, and understand what her relatives experienced on their primitive trail.
Defined as a “saga” by some readers and reviewers, A Home on Wilder Shores provides vivid imagery of the Colonial time period. The conflict, how two women alone manage without a man in a new and strange world, reveals the characters’ courage, determination, and self-reliance.
On her literary research journey, Posey visited many historic sites that may have been encountered by her great aunts, such as Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, Pa., and the first Moravian village, near Winston-Salem, N.C.
