LAURA ROARK SHROPSHIRE: HER LIFE AND WORKS – 2001
by John J. Roark
$35.00 – Hardcover
Her life and works revealed in this biography (available for only $30) are so moving and interesting you will not be able to put it down.
From Rear Cover
My gratitude to John Roark for the excellent book written about my mother, Laura Roark Shropshire. With all of his thorough research he brought out man things that I did not know. John’s writings expressed everything in its true light as it happened. As you read this new book you will once again appreciate our great heritage. Betty Shropshire Glover
John Roark has written an amazing biography of Laura Roark Shropshire. It is splendid in its conception, wrapping the force of history, community, family, and faith around the details of the tragedies and triumphs of this complex lady. John’s intricate characterization of Laura and the age in which she lived makes a compelling read for family and stranger alike. Doris Shropshire Thornton
From Inside Cover
Laura Roark Shropshire — a descendant of Scotch-Irish pioneers who arrived in America in 1720, and through seven generations pushed the western frontier through Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, and to the southeast corner of Tennessee — was part of that unique generation born during the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War. Her generation saw the Unites States move from a predominantly agrarian economy and rural society to an urban culture blessed with conveniences un-imagined by their parents. Laura’s father was a farmer — a descendant of farmers — who used farming equipment, methods and techniques amazingly similar to those used by farmers twenty centuries before. Laura was born in the log cabin built by her paternal grandfather and, as a child, lived in the confined environment of a home heated in winter by an open fire and lighted at night by candles or a kerosene lantern. She saw meals prepared over the open fireplace, water drawn by hand from a nearby well, and almost all the family needs supplied by the family farm. From these austere yet comfortable childhood, Laura, like many of her generation was forced during her lifetime to adjust to a new world of urban living, large cities with air-conditioned houses, television, auto-congested freeways, jet travel, and space exploration.
Using materials primarily from Laura’s own records and writings, the author shares with the reader Laura’s life as she strived to adjust to ever changing circumstances and struggled to overcome life’s challenges.
Born with an innate love of family history and a desire for a formal education, Laura sought — against the will of both her father and her husband — to become a school teacher. We see her as she struggles with the choice between school and marriage, and we follow her as she assumes the role of a farmer’s wife, dedicating herself to the support of her husband and to the responsibility of mothering and rearing six children. We grieve with her in the loss of her first born and in the death of her husband — after only nineteen years of marriage, when she was not yet 43. We see her struggle with widowhood and the sole responsibility of raising her five children, all under the age of adolescence.
We then follow Laura as she “peddles” milk, eggs, and vegetables to support her family during the Depression and agonize with her as she struggles to manage a dairy farm and protect it from foreclosure. Later, after all her children had left home, we empathize with Laura as she tries bravely to face a new world so different from that of her rural upbringing and traditions. We see her struggle to find new meaning for her life and then see her enthusiastically assume the mantle of her family historian and begin writing family history under the subtle guidance of an unmet distant cousin in California.
The biographical work is well documented and makes full use of the personal writings of the subject. The author’s research and analysis has creatively presented the true story of a woman’s struggle in reacting to a new age and an incongruous environment.