In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden
The Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood of 1889 resulted from the collapse of the South Fork dam which created a mountain lake for the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, an elite club of industrialists such as Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, and Andrew Carnegie. When the dam burst, the resulting wall of water and debris swept through the thriving steel community of Johnstown below, killing more than 2,200 people.
Kathleen Cambor uses these events for In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden, drawing on the dualities of the wealthy members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club and the working-class citizens of Johnstown for the tensions of this novel. In part she uses the historical lives of figures such as Carnegie and Mellon, but she also creates fictional lives for her story.
The central characters are Nora Talbot, the daughter of the South Fork Club’s lawyer, and Daniel Fallon, son of a Johnstown steel worker. Nora has loved the Club from childhood, not for its social offerings but as a setting for her passion for natural history, an interest her ambitious parents discourage. Daniel, a college student, steel worker, and labor organizer, has secretly observed Nora’s solitary excursions in the woods and has come to love her. The flood ends their budding romance, as it ends the lives of all Daniel’s family.
Cambor dramatizes other conflicts as well. The social and economic aftermath of the Civil War, the effects of a diphtheria epidemic, the status of new immigrants—all form part of the fabric of America of the 1880’s which Cambor portrays even more vividly than she portrays the flood itself.
Sources for Further Study
Booklist 97 (November 15, 2000): 608.
Library Journal 125 (October 15, 2000): 100.
The New York Times Book Review 106 (January 14, 2001): 10.
Publishers Weekly 247 (October 16, 2000): 46.