In Their Own Words

Praise for In Their Own Words Waldron and Huntington have caught the rail of the past as it slips out of memory. Here they are, the farmers, doctors, storekeepers, the men and women who were Loudoun County before it traded its lanes, fields, cows, and orchards for SUVs and instant mansions. They remember it in their own words, and Waldron's spare and chiseled interviews ring in the mind. In Huntington's portraits, they look as planted and permanent as Mount Rushmore, but they aren't, of course. In a sense they're already gone, and this quietly disturbing book is what we have left. Barbara Holland This is a gem, a marvel of its kind, the collected memories and anecdotes of Loudoun's most venerable old-timers. Their stories and faces reveal lives fully-lived and crows feet well-earned; all of them captured here in the innocence of their nostalgia by portrait photographer Sarah Huntington and writer-editor Gale Waldron.John Rolfe Gardiner In Their Own Words possesses the intimate distance of a Civil War ambrotype. Skunk-skinners, moonshiners, milk trains, corncob fires, and five-cent kids come alive on the page. A lament for a Loudoun lost within living memory, here beautifully regained. Tony Horwitz