Source: Lula Feaster Album
Medium: Silver Albumin Carte de Visite
Studio: J. R. Schorb
Printed: J. R. SCHORB
Yorkville,
S.C.
Album Notes:
Cousin Feaster Lyles- Later, Florence & Edith's father.

Image 2

Source: Lula Feaster Album
Medium: Silver Albumin Carte de Visite
Studio: J. R. Schorb
Printed: J. R. SCHORB
Yorkville,
S.C.
Handwritten:
[Back](Several notes)
To Lula from Cousin Feas
(and in a different script)
Cadet J. F. Lyles
March 20th '64
Fairfield Dist.
(also has Lula's stamp)
Album Notes:
Feaster Lyles

John Feaster Lyles gave a signed carte-de-visite with his image in his cadet uniform to second-cousin, Maria Louisa Georgiana Feaster (Lula), who saved the image in her Civil War era album.

J. Feaster Lyles and Lula Feaster had many things in common. They were the same age, entering their teenage years as the Civil War began. During the war, each lost a father (Henry J. Lyles and Nathan Andrew Feaster, respectively), uncles, and many cousins. Feaster Lyles and Lula Feaster were second- cousins, sharing John Feaster (1768-1848) and his wife Drucilla Mobley Feaster as common ancestors. Feaster Lyles and Lula Feaster were well educated and cultured young members of the Feasterville community of Fairfield County, South Carolina.

After the war, J. Feaster Lyles and his sister, Isabelle, taught at the Feasterville Male and Female Academy [1]. He was an instructor for a time at Kings Mountain Military Academy in York County, with an interest in history, mathematics, and geology of South Carolina [2]. In the 1870 census he was listed in Fairfield Co. as a 23-year-old farm manager with his mother Edith in house number 212, very near house 215 where Lula Feaster (Louisa, age 22) was staying with her uncle Trez D. Feaster and his family.

J. Feaster Lyles married Carrie Evelyn Lyles, a daughter of his uncle Thomas Minter Lyles and Eliza Peay, and the couple had 7 children. The 1880 census shows the couple with their 4-month-old child Henry J. Lyles, named for Feas' deceased father.

John (Johann) Schorb who photographed young cadet Lyles was one of the first photographers in the United States, a student of Dr. Charles Avery of New York who himself learned his techniques directly from Louis Daguerre in Paris. Schorb painted many of the backgrounds he used for his photographs. After his education in New York, Schorb traveled and photographed widely, lived in Winnsboro, SC from 1850 to 1853, then moved to York, SC in 1853 where he taught at the Kings Mountain Military Academy, photographed, and died at 89. Winthrop University Archives preserve a large collection of Schorb's work, some of which is exhibited through the Winthrop website [3].

Sources:

1. Bolick, Julian Stevenson. 1963. A Fairfield Sketchbook. With introduction by Kathleen Lewis Sloan. Fairfield County Historical Society, Winnsboro, South Carolina. Reprinted 2000. p. 268.
   
   
2. Coleman, James P., with the assistance of many others, Robert Coleman Family: From Virginia to Texas 1652-1965, Privately published by James P. Coleman, Ackerman, Mississippi, 1965; mfg. by Kingsport Press, Inc., Kingsport TN, 451 pp, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1430 Senate St., P.O. Box 11,669, Columbia, SC 29211. p. 357.
   
   
3. www.winthrop.edu/dacus/about/Archives/collections/johnschorb.htm

• Individual Record