The View from Tom's Stand

Born a city girl, Jane Alexander was tugged from a vibrant, culture-laden metropolitan life to a primitive woods camp in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. There on a little flat surrounded by towering oaks and hemlocks she spent six-weeks every summer with her husband Tom and their two small children building a simple, old-timey log cabin with proper dovetail joints, mud chinking and hand-built stairs. With no roof over her head, no plumbing, no electricity she eventually got into the rhythm of rustic living and the wilderness became part of her soul.

Hiking the Smokies, the Blue Ridge and beyond she came to know more about the native Smoky Mountain plants than many of the locals. In her spare time she learned to cane chairs, to weave, to paint and to make haunting photographs of the gorgeous mountains around her.

Jane Alexander, an experienced journalist and editor, grew up in Utica and Cold Spring Harbor, New York and graduated from Smith College. After several years at Life, where she and Tom met, she joined the staff of Time-Life Books and was editor of the Nature Science Annual for eight years. Later she joined the staff of Science 80 magazine as a senior editor. Retiring in the late 1980s she and her husband Tom, also an experienced journalist, moved back to Tom's childhood home, the Cataloochee Ranch, to a log house they hewed from timber on the property.

The book is a 310 page quarto, soft cover with flaps, illustrated throughout with 374 photographs, 55 in color. Historical pictures come from family albums and the Cataloochee Ranch Collection. Cover image is by Bill Harbin, Rome, Georgia. Book design is by Susan Rhew Design, Asheville, North Carolina.