The writer and graphic artist David Hunter Strother was perhaps the best-known and most well-regarded illustrator in the United States in the 1850s. His illustrated stories appeared mainly in Harper's Monthly, the most popular literary magazine of its time, and his pen name, Porte Crayon, was immediately recognizable in homes across the country. His work infused the fashionable travel genre with colloquial humor and local color, primarily through the vivid descriptions and characters of his native South and its people. While Strother's writings are usually no longer read, they remain valuable to literary, cultural, and social historians.

Strother was born on 26 September 1816 into a well-regarded family in Martinsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia). His father, John Strother, a former militia colonel, was assistant county clerk, and his mother, Elizabeth Hunter Strother, was a member of one of the elite "first families" of Virginia. During his first twelve years Strother...