Hotel at Hot Springs into a World War I prisoner-of-war internment camp for German sailors. Families of the prisoners lived in town, some at Jane's boarding house. Songs and stories English folk song collector Cecil Sharp and his colleague Maud Karpeles were invited to Appalachia by American folklorist Olive Dame Campbell in 1916 to seek out old songs and ballads, especially those that had travelled from the British Isles. It was Dorland principal Lucy Shafer who suggested they meet Jane Gentry. From August 24, 1916 until July 27, 1917, Sharp and Karpeles made several visits to notate Jane's songs, obtaining a total of 70 from her. Sharp did not comment specifically on the likely origin of her songs, but believed that in general the older Appalachian ballads came from England or Lowland Scotland. Holgar Nygard, Professor Emeritus of English at Duke University, suggested that Scotland was the more likely source for many of the songs in Jane's repertoire, but Brian Peters, in a detailed study of Sharp's Appalachian collection, showed that ballads such as "Barbara Allen", "Little Musgrave" and "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender" most likely originated in England. Jane referred to her stories as "Jack, Will and Tom Tales". Musician and historian Betty N. Smith compared the structure of the tales to German Märchen fairy tales, but speculated that they may have originated with the Hick's English ancestors. Author Irving Bacheller and his wife Anna first met Jane at her boarding house in 1914, telling stories and riddles to delighted children. The Bachellers were so impressed with Jane that they invited her to visit them in Greenwich, Connecticut. According to Betty N. Smith's research, the visit was incorporated into Bacheller's novel Tower of a Hundred Bells, destroyed by a house fire in 1917, a fact confirmed after Jane's death, in a letter from Bacheller to her daughter Maud Long, "I wrote a book largely about your mother and her mountain life which was destroyed by a fire that burned my home in 1917." Fifteen stories of Jane's were contained within twenty-three stories total published by Isabel Gordon Carter in The Journal of American Folklore in 1925. The other stories in the published work were six by Susie Wilkenson of Sevier County, Tennessee, and two stories by John Campbell of Townsend, Tennessee. As noted by Carter, folklorists of the time had primarily collected songs and overlooked the stories. When Jane