10/05/2026
In 1901, Bayard Wootten came home to New Bern with two young sons and very little money. A few years later she was making her living with a camera. 📷
Born in New Bern in 1875, she had married Charles Wootten in 1897 and had taught art at schools for the deaf in Arkansas and Georgia. After she returned to New Bern, she moved into photography around 1904. The UNC finding aid explains the shift this way: photographic orders could replace the slow, labor-intensive work of painting portraits.
The business grew. She opened a studio in Chapel Hill in 1928, and in the 1920s she became the official photographer for the Carolina Playmakers and the Yackety Yack, the UNC yearbook. She also illustrated six books in the 1930s and early 1940s. The University of North Carolina holds her collection today. 🎭
Sources disagree on many of the exact dates and counts, so the plainest summary is the safest one. A woman with two sons and a new trade built a long career behind the camera, and she died in New Bern in 1959. 🏛️
