Cathy Pender Emmert
Lowcountry Originals 2023
When and how did you discover your artistic talent?
I discovered my artistic talent in December 2015. My family’s business, Pender Brother’s, bought the contract to purchase the last two and one-half miles of the Port Royal Railroad in 2011. When we purchased the contract to take up that section of railroad, we also purchased the rights to keep what we took up, meaning we kept the rock, rail, crossties, spikes, clips, and plates. They wanted to scrap everything, but I kept insisting we could do something with it. We sold off most of it, but kept the spikes, along with some clips, plates, and rail. I was scrolling Facebook a few weeks before Christmas and saw a picture of a horseshoe Christmas tree on someone’s page. I shared it to my page thinking “I can make that.” A few days later my husband and I were in the shop, and he took a few horseshoes my dad had, and laid them out into the shape of a Christmas tree and said, “Here honey, weld that together.” I did, which prompted me to make the words “Love” and “Joy” out of the spikes. And that started it all.