ortimer Heath must have been raised right.

Around 1872, at the age of 19 or 20, Heath left his parents in England and sailed to America, where he began working at the C.W. Garrett and Co. winery in western Halifax County, North Carolina. But he wrote home regularly, and along with each letter he mailed a sketch that captured some aspect of his life at the winery. Heath’s father carefully pasted the sketches into a scrapbook.

Those sketches now give us a rare glimpse into life in rural North Carolina in the 1870s. Garrett and Co. was the largest and most famous winery in North Carolina, which was at the time the largest wine-producing state in the Union. Heath worked for the winery for six years or so, sketching when he had spare time.

H.G. Jones first viewed Heath’s sketches on a trip to London in 1987, after Christopher Terrell, Heath’s great-nephew, had written to Jones to tell him about Heath’s scrapbook. The scrapbook eventually made its way back to North Carolina, where Jones, who is the former curator of the North Carolina Collection and former director of state archives and history, had Heath’s sketches photographed and reprinted in book form as Sketches in North Carolina USA 1872 to 1878. The book features 100 pen, pencil, and watercolor drawings by Heath, as well as a 35-page history of the winery that Jones researched and wrote. Heath’s drawings show day-to-day life on the grounds of the winery, with the occasional coon hunt, tree felling, and hog killing included.

eath sketched his 21st birthday, December 15, 1874, by showing himself sitting up in bed, his arm cocked to throw a large black boot at two cats as they run out of the room. The handwritten caption reads: "Confound those cats how in the thunder did they get in my room….a terrible scrimmage."

Heath also sketched Mosby Hall, an antebellum mansion at Littleton, N.C., where he rented a room for a time. The house no longer stands, but architectural historians have described Mosby Hall as one of the great federal-style houses in the state. Heath’s drawings are the only nineteenth century record of the building.

"This is the most significant previously unpublished collection of drawings about our state during the 1800s that we know of," Jones says.

Copies are available by writing Wilson Library, Campus Box 3930, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-8890.