Blue Ridge Country magazine editor Cara Ellen Modisett grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and was introduced to the magazine by her uncle, an attorney and photographer, when she was in college.
Grow up in the south and of course the Civil War never leaves you. I grew up hearing about how our grandfather's Shenandoah Valley barn was burned and rebuilt, and taking school trips to the New Market battlefield (I was intensely jealous of a classmate who actually stumbled across a bullet on the field, maybe turned up by rain or something, not discovered for more than a century since so many were killed there). It's that scar in 19th century history, four awful years when two percent of the nation's population died too young. It's an architectural dividing mark – houses may be antebellum, or postbellum. (Interesting how disaster and tragedy divides the age and character of buildings in some places – in London, houses are only really old if they're pre-1666, the year of the Great Fire.)
