Speaker

• Dave Tabler Author
  Dave Tabler

  Author

  Ten-year-old Dave Tabler decided he was going to read the ‘R’ volume of the family’s World Book Encyclopedia set over summer vacation. He never made it from beginning to end. He did, however, become interested in Norman Rockwell, rare-earth elements, and the Run for the Roses.

  Tabler’s father encouraged him to try his hand at taking pictures with the family camera. With visions of Rockwell dancing in his head, Tabler press-ganged his younger brother into wearing a straw hat and sitting next to a stream barefoot with a homemade fishing pole in his hand. The resulting image was… terrible.

  Fresh out of college with degrees in art history and photojournalism, Tabler contributed the photography for The Illustrated History of American Civil War Relics. This experience taught him how to work with museum curators, collectors, and white cotton gloves. In addition, he met a man in the Shenandoah Valley who played the musical saw, a Knoxville fellow who specialized in collecting barbed wire, and Tom Dickey, brother of the man who wrote Deliverance.

  In 2006, Tabler launched AppalachianHistory.net, drawing on those earlier encounters with Appalachian culture. Today the site attracts 375,000 readers annually.

  He moved to Delaware in 2010 and became smitten with its rich past. Tabler no longer copies Norman Rockwell, but his experience working with curators and collectors proved invaluable when he set out to create a photographic tribute to Delaware’s colonial heritage. That project marked the beginning of an ongoing journey into Delaware’s layered past.