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From The Daily News-Record, Harrisonburg, Virginia
By Jessica Clarke
Tuesday December 29, 1998

Looking Back: Lot’s Wife Publishing Focuses on Valley History

STAUNTON— Three women are building a business here based on the past.

Unlike the biblical Lot’s Wife, who became a pillar of salt for her backward glance, the partners are marketing their reputations as historians.

“We figure (Lot’s wife) must be the first documented female historian because she looked back,” Nancy Sorrells says.

Lot’s Wife Publishing, run by Sorrells, Katharine Brown, and Sue Simmons, may be unique in focusing on books about Shenandoah Valley and Virginia History.

“Everybody says history is so boring,” says Sorrells, 39, of Greenville. “It doesn’t have to be. It’s the way you present it.”

Lot’s Wife’s first book, finished two years ago, was a 300-page history of 250-year-old Trinity Episcopal Church here. The book included information about local government and the Valley’s first settler.

“We placed the story of their church in a bigger context, how it had its ups and downs with economic swings, how it fits into their denomination and how it fits into the whole picture of America,” says Brown 58, former director of the Woodrow Wilson birthplace downtown and until October head of the research and collections department of the Museum of American Frontier Culture here.

The Trinity Episcopal book, a hardcover volume the women wrote and designed, grew from a history Sorrells compiled for the Church’s 250th anniversary. Five hundred copies were printed.

The trio is writing a history of Winchester’s Christ Episcopal Church founded in 1746. A thousand hardcover copies will be printed.

Their next project will be to research, write and design a history of Augusta County’s Old Providence Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. About 1,000 copies will be printed.

Lot’s Wife’s memoir by Edith Paxton, Staunton’s first female circuit court clerk, who served from 1951 to 1978, has just been printed. The company edited and designed the softcover book, “And Then There Was More,” about Augusta County’s farm life in the 20’s and 30’s.

Brown, Simmons, and Sorrells divide research for their projects by eras and themes. Their research includes conducting interviews and studying church documents, newspapers, letters, and other family and court records.

The women are skilled, enterprising scholars and historians, says Dennis Case, who was on Trinity Episcopal’s 250th anniversary committee. Their book was well-received and “historically sound.”

Augusta County courthouse records date to 1745, when the county extended west to the Mississippi River. Up to 100 people weekly from around the United States research family histories and other projects using court records, circuit court clerk John Davis says.

The intense interest shows “a crying need” for books about Valley history. “There are so many stories, so many histories, so many things untold that need to be told,” Davis notes.

Lot’s Wife owners hope to meet a need for other historical publications. They’re mulling updating and reprinting out-of-print books about the valley—memoirs, biographies, and family histories.


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