Hart Square
Clothbound with jacket
11.9 by 12.5 in.
400 pages
Winner of the “Gold IPPY,” a national independent publishers award, in the coffee table book category, May 2012; winner of an “Award of Excellence” at the North Carolina Museums Council Annual Meeting in Asheville, March 19, 2012; Honorable Mention at the Southeastern Museums Conference Annual Meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, November 2012.
For over forty years, Dr. Robert Hart (1936–2020) of Hickory, North Carolina, rescued and restored Carolina life of the nineteenth century, creating in the rolling countryside of Catawba County an entire village — the largest collection of original, historical log structures in the United States. From corn cribs and barns, to houses and chapels, and even a few outhouses, Hart Square features 798 color photographs of the structures and their period furnishings, not forgoing detailed histories and the often humorous anecdotes of moving and restoring them (sometimes at peril to life, limb, and digit). As the first touches of autumn fleck Hog Hill on the fourth Saturday in October, Bob and Becky Hart’s “farm,” as they simply called it, still bustles with over two hundred knowledgeable artisans and docents demonstrating and sharing the craftsmanship and subsistence of the area’s pioneers. To enter the village on festival day is to enter the early 1800s, and there is little to break the spell.
