About this time Mrs. Porter was employed as a contributor to INTERNATIONAL BIBLE ENCYCLOPEDIA. For four years, she also served as specialist in natural history and photography on PHOTOGRAPHIC TIMES ANNUAL.
While making photographs of birds in the spring of 1910, Mrs. Porter became interested in their music, calls, and sounds; the result was MUSIC OF THE WILD. She dedicated this book to her husband’s brother, Dr. Miles Porter, then a physician in Fort Wayne.
Mrs. Porter also collected moth specimens and eggs and brought them home for study. She sometimes placed eggs on her pillow so that she might be wakened by the sound of the moths breaking from the cocoon. Besides making photographs of their egg-laying and other activities during their short lives, she painted water colors of them. Her easel was made for her by her father when she was a child. MOTHS OF THE LIMBERLOST, published in 1912, grew from these labors and studies.
Mrs. Porter’s public, now a definite segment of the reading population, awaited the coming of each new book with the Gene Stratton Porter signature. In 1911, she published HARVESTER, which became her most popular book. LADDIE, another very popular novel, was published in 1913.
By this time Mrs. Porter alternated each serious book of nature with a romantic novel liberally sprinkled with nature facts and lore. During her residence at Geneva, she wrote five novels and five nature books and adopted the practice of publishing a book on her birthday.
Agricultural interests began dredging the Limberlost region after 1913, and its virgin beauty was soon transformed into a lush pattern of onions, celery, and sugar beets. Oil wells, frequently-traveled roads, and modern fences left no place for birds and moths and temporarily ended Mrs. Porter’s research in nature. Her thoughts turned to her childhood at Sylvan Lake, so she purchased one hundred fifty acres of virgin timberland at its edge, named it Wildflower Woods, and built a cabin named Limberlost in memory of the first cabin at Geneva. One of the outstanding features in her new home was a fireplace which contained stones from every state in the Union. The kitchen was regarded as a showplace by the people of the community; large and well-furnished, it was used as a model and an object lesson for groups of women interested in homemaking and home economics.
Her remarkable garden contained more than three thousand varieties of plants. She employed a tree surgeon to repair damage to old and valuable trees and improved the property near Rome City in other ways. She also went to unusual lengths to preserve the bird life against destruction and was particularly interested in perpetuating a colony of horned owls.
During her residence there she cataloged more than twenty-three thousand flowers and plants and published four books: MICHAEL O’HALLORAN (1915), MORNING FACE (1916), DAUGHTER OF THE LAND (1918), and HOMING WITH THE BIRDS (1919). Because of a paper shortage the publisher asked Mrs. Porter to cut MICHAEL O’HALLORAN one hundred pages after it was practically completed. This she did, and still met the deadline.
At the outbreak of World War I, Mrs. Porter was engaged in the revision and enlargement of WHAT I HAVE DONE WITH BIRDS. Although she attempted to do whatever war work met her hands, she managed to complete the revision, FRIENDS IN FEATHER, in 1917.
In 1922 and 1923, Mrs. Porter wrote editorials for McCALL’S. Although this was a new experience, her work was regarded as very successful.