The Road to Thornlea

Catskill Clove by Asher Brown Durand, 1864

When you write novels you’re going to need names. Lots of them. For novels based on real historical events like The American Patriot Series, some of your characters and settings might be historical figures and places, which happily eliminates the need to name them. But that leaves your fictional characters and the settings they inhabit, all of which you want to be memorable, including their names. And choosing the lot of them can be hair-rippingly frustrating, especially if you’re obsessive like I am!

Thankfully some do come easily, like Elizabeth Howard. But other names require considerable pondering, research, making lists, combining and recombining different first and last names if they’re people, and striking out options until the character or place steps forward and reveals itself to you. Like Jonathan Carleton, for instance. Just like his character in the series, he was stubbornly, exasperatingly enigmatic, and I had to wait, tapping my foot impatiently, for him to finally emerge from the mists. And then he rather exploded onto the page, the rascal!

But occasionally a character or place is already there, fully named, when you arrive, as though they were given, as though they existed in the dim recesses of time long before they stepped to the fore. Charles Andrews and James Stowe were two of those characters. And the name of Carleton’s Virginia estate, Thornlea, was also one simply “given.” In the chapter in Daughter of Liberty where Elizabeth and Carleton first meet, Andrews refers to the estate and gives a brief description.

“Oh, it’s just a modest plot of land—twenty thousand acres or so running up into the Blue Ridge. Most of it is heavily forested, but enough is cleared to pasture about three hundred head of cattle and a hundred horses. I swear, the main house rivals the great manors of England, and the countryside around it is second to none for beauty.”

All of that simply spilled out onto the page without any forethought. I had no idea.

Roanoke River Watershed 

Nor, in spite of scattered references to “Thornlea” in the previous books of the series, did I have any idea whatever of exactly where this estate would be set, other than in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, or what it would consist of. I only knew vaguely that at some point the story would go there. Well, Forge of Freedom is the last book in the series, and the hour of reckoning has come! So I’ve had to buckle down and try to bring it to vibrant life.

I discovered early on that I would have to locate an approximate real-world area where the estate is set to figure out its landscape, flora, and fauna. I also had to take into account the events of the British Southern Campaign since Carleton would be involved in opposing those actions and Thornlea would be his base of operation. A detailed topical relief map of Virginia led me to a lovely deep valley carved into the Blue Ridge just south of the Roanoke River, which back then was the Staunton River, and a short distance north of the Poor Mountain State Natural Area Preserve. Above is a map of the Roanoke River watershed to give you an idea of the general location. As you see, it’s strategically located not far from the North Carolina Border. In order to explain the name Thornlea, this became Thorn Valley, named for the hawthorn and black locust trees growing thickly in it (thorn), and for the meadows (lea) where Carleton’s herds of livestock graze. Who knew?! And where in the world did that come from three decades ago when I first started writing Daughter of Liberty with no idea of making it into a series??? A moment of serendipity or something else? Whatever the case, the river that runs through it consequently became the Thorn River.

Landscape Beyond the Tree
by Asher Brown Durand 

For the sake of visualization, I searched for historical paintings of similar mountain landscapes to stand in for Thorn Valley. For now, several of Asher Brown Durand’s 19th century landscapes of the Catskills on the northern end of the Appalachian chain fit the bill pretty well. Shown at the top of the post is a view that looks much the way I envision the overlook at the valley's entrance. The one to the right portrays what might be a vista of the valley floor on the road leading toward the estate.

Now to figure out what the manor house and surrounding establishment look like. Which means drawing a map of the estate, finding exterior photos of historical Scottish mansions or castles that look like what I’m imagining, and then drawing floor plans of the house. So far I’ve come up with a rough map of the estate, which could stand to be cleaned up but is good enough for me to keep the characters’ movements consistent. However, the house will have 4 stories, which means the floor plan is going to take a bit of work to figure out so I can have my characters move around in it without pesky continuity errors cropping up.

In tomorrow’s post, I’m going to share photos of Thornlea’s double and the first, currently somewhat rough, descriptions woven into Chapter Two of Forge of Freedom. Please let me know your thoughts about all this, and be sure to join me back here tomorrow to take a closer look!

Images are from Wikipedia and are in the public domain.