Qualla: Pearl S. Buck Birthplace

Pearl S. Buck Birthplace: Introduction

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beeflower, CC BY-SA 3.0. Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker spent exactly three months in the house where she was born before her parents carried her back to China. It was June 26, 1892, and the three-story home in Hillsboro, West Virginia -- hand-built by her mother's Dutch immigrant family decades earlier -- was just a waypoint between missionary postings. Yet this house in the Allegheny highlands would anchor Pearl S. Buck's imagination for the rest of her life. She grew up speaking Chinese before English, set her most famous novel in the wheat fields of Anhwei Province, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature, and wrote more than a hundred books. But when she spoke of where she truly belonged, she always came back to Hillsboro. "For me that house was a gateway to America," she wrote. "May it live again, my Mother's house."

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Image: Beeflower | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pearl S. Buck Birthplace: Three Hundred Souls from Utrecht

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beeflower, CC BY 3.0. The house's story begins not in Appalachia but in the Netherlands. In 1847, Cornelius Stulting -- whom Pearl Buck would later call "Mynheer" in her books -- left Utrecht with his wife Arnolda, their five married sons and their families, and some three hundred friends and relative...

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Image: Beeflower | CC BY 3.0

Pearl S. Buck Birthplace: Missionaries and a Mulberry Tree

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Caroline Stulting, called Carrie, grew up in that house and married Absalom Sydenstricker, one of nine children from a prominent Greenbrier County family whose German ancestor Philip had arrived in America by ship in 1764. Shortly after their marriage, Absalom and Carrie left for...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Pearl S. Buck Birthplace: A Hundred Books and Two Prizes

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stacie Gilmore, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pearl S. Buck became the first American woman to win both the Pulitzer Prize, in 1932 for The Good Earth, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. She wrote more than a hundred books, hundreds of short stories, and countless magazine articles. Her work was translated into sixt...

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Image: Stacie Gilmore | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pearl S. Buck Birthplace: Saving the House

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beeflower, Public domain. The Stulting family lived in the house until 1922. George P. Edgar then bought it as a winter home. By the early 1960s, it risked falling into ruin. Jim Comstock, a local newspaperman, raised about four thousand dollars through readers of the West Virginia Hillbilly to begin the ...

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Image: Beeflower | Public domain

Pearl S. Buck Birthplace: Gateway to America

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beeflower, CC BY 3.0. The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace is now a museum offering guided tours through rooms filled with period furnishings, over a hundred historic farm and woodworking tools in the barn, and Sydenstricker-era artifacts in the log house. The memorial garden, started by the Greenbrier Distri...

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Image: Beeflower | CC BY 3.0