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Message:: [QUOTE="2manybooks, post: 9601303, member: 8267"]The article was written in a local paper in 2016, at which time she was 92 years old. It refers to her as a North Carolina native, but the newspaper is from East Wenatchee, which is in Washington state. Some relevant highlights - "Nita Cunningham likes to stay busy. For most of her 92 years, the North Carolina native has sewed clothing for the family, made doll clothes for the kids, turned found objects into pieces of folk art." "She began painting Indian and Western scenes on flat and smooth rocks she would find. The scenes grew larger and the rocks heavier. She began painting on seashells, then on large, smooth-surface ornamental gourds. When she found a man who grew the gourds she liked, she bought all he had." "One of her favorite scenes depicts the "Trail of Tears," the devastating exodus of Cherokee Indians from their land east of the Mississippi River to Oklahoma during the Indian Removal Act of 1830 under President Andrew Jackson. Several gourds show the journey, each one different." "You have to look closely. They all tell a story," Cunningham said as she turned the gourd in her hands to show Indians circling down trails from their homes in the Appalachian Mountains and joining others on their long migration to desert high plains of Oklahoma."[/QUOTE]