Bayard Wootten

The Wootten-Moulton museum will be opening in New Bern North Carolina soon in an historic home on East Front Street by Anthony Lilly and Ashley Norman.

Wootten attended New Bern public schools and then studied at the State Normal and Industrial College (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) from 1892 to 1894.

When her husband Charles Wootten abandoned her for the Gold rush she returned home to New Bern to support her two sons by painting flowers on china and fine dresses.

Wootten once instructed her employee Rudy Faircloth to lower her over a cliff to make a photograph of Linville Falls, a famous natural landmark in North Carolina.

[4] Her photographs illustrated six books, including Backwoods America by Charles Morrow Wilson, 1934; Cabins in the Laurel by Muriel Sheppard, 1935; Old Homes and Gardens of North Carolina by Archibald Henderson, 1939; and From My Highest Hill by Olive Tilford Dargan, 1941.

Wootten's photography illustrated five books during her lifetime, including Charleston: Azalias and Old Bricks, North Carolina Homes and Gardens, and From My Highest Hill.

Her images fill UNC at Chapel Hill year books and newspapers, while her larger than life pictorialist photographs line North Carolina State Government building walls and Court Houses.

Lilly's Wootten-Moulton Museum collection holds hundreds of family letters and business papers detailing the working relationship with Caleb Bradham.

[6] Her work has been exhibited at Harvard University, the Century of Progress Exposition, the Academy of Arts in Richmond, Virginia, and in numerous locations in North Carolina.