Silver City, Nevada- Silver City has always attracted creative folks - sometimes only for one day. Back in 1939, world famous photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White and novelist Erskine Caldwell stopped in Silver City and were married in a church here (it later became the home of legendary newsman Travus T. Hipp).
The couple found a minister in Carson City, and took him with them in search of a place to be married “before sundown.” In her auto-biography Portrait of Myself, Bourke-White wrote that, “we rounded a curve and there was Silver City, hanging on a bluff above us, looking so charming that both of us knew that this was the perfect town.”
They found a church in town, but it was locked. Bourke-White recalls that their taxi driver searched the town for someone to open the church. He found a “nice, clean woman” named Bertha Peddlar running a local shop. She unlocked the doors for them and stayed to serve as one of the witnesses to the marriage. Bourke-White was “enchanted” with the church and the "glorious panorama of bluffs and mesas and desert patches stretching as far as the eye could reach."
Her husband, Erskine Caldwell, was at that time already well-known for his writing about poverty and racism in the U.S. in his novels such as Tobacco Road. By the end of his life he’d written 25 novels and 150 short stories.
Margaret Bourke-White was the first accredited woman war correspondent, taking combat zone pictures during World War II and some of the first horrifying photographs documenting Nazi concentration camps after the war.
She became on international “symbol of swashbuckling photography during her unique career.” In their book World War II, authors Carl J. Schneider and Dorothy Schneider wrote that she was “torpedoed in the Mediterranean, strafed by the Luftwaffe, stranded on an Arctic island, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled out of the Chesapeake when her chopper crashed.” She interviewed and photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi a few hours before his assassination in India.
If you search “Margaret Bourke-White photographs”, you’ll recognize many of the famous images that earned her the reputation as one of the most important photographers of the 20th Century.
My son and his fiancee also think Silver City is the perfect town for a wedding. They’re getting married here next summer.
