Founder Story - Meet Laura

From Heritage and Hearth to the Hands That Light the Way

Yorktown, Virginia (a couple of decades ago)

A sixteen-year-old girl drives alone down a quiet Virginia back road. Eventually the road she is on becomes the Colonial Parkway. The trees lean in. The air shifts. The Yorktown battlefields begin to appear through the woods.

She does not know exactly where she is going. She only knows she has to go.

Something pulls her toward those fields. Toward the places where the ground itself remembers. Toward the land that carries the weight of everything that came before her.

She goes there to think. To dream. To quiet a storm inside herself that has no other remedy. History makes her feel less alone in the world.

What she does not know yet is that the land she is driving through is not only American history.

It is her history. My story.

My name is Laura Raschke. I am a professor, a maker, the wife of an Army veteran, and a daughter of Virginia's long and complicated past. I am firmly in the third season of my life. Much of that life has been a quiet search for the land and the stories that made me.

Autumn Laurel & Co. is what that lifelong journey became.

Autumn Laurel began nearly seven years ago as something far less defined. It was not a company then. It was simply a longing.

A longing for stillness.
For reflection.
For the quiet spaces where memory and meaning have room to breathe.

At the time I was living in Savannah, Georgia, a city steeped in its own deep and complicated past. I spent seventeen years there, walking beneath live oaks draped in Spanish moss, surrounded by architecture and stories that seemed to whisper from every brick and cobblestone.

Savannah has a way of teaching you that history is not distant. It lives in the air.

But eventually the pull of home grew stronger.

When I returned to Virginia, to the landscapes that had shaped my family for centuries, that quiet and shapeless dream finally began to take form. The mountains, the tidewater, the battlefields, the orchards, the smell of woodsmoke in autumn air — they were not simply scenery.

They were memory.

And slowly, almost without realizing it, that longing became Autumn Laurel & Co.

My lineage stretches back more than eight centuries. Through the Cartier family of France. Through the Tidewater shores of colonial Virginia. Through Robert "King" Carter, one of the most powerful figures in colonial America and acting governor of Virginia in the early eighteenth century, whose Corotoman Plantation once stood along the banks of the Rappahannock River.

From there the story moves west.

His son John Carter, my fifth great-grandfather, followed the call of the frontier into the mountains of Virginia and North Carolina during the Revolutionary era. His descendants pushed further into the wilderness of what would become East Tennessee. Landon Carter gave his name to Carter County. Elizabeth Carter lent hers to the town of Elizabethton.

My family did not simply witness American history.

In many places, it helped name it.

But history is never simple.

Robert King Carter's wealth and power were built upon the labor of enslaved people. That reality is not a footnote in my family story. It is central to it. I carry that truth with open eyes. I believe the most meaningful thing a descendant can do is acknowledge the full story and choose what to build from it.

Autumn Laurel is named for the land and the seasons, not the plantation legacy.

It is built on the belief that honoring the past requires honesty as much as reverence, and that the most meaningful way to carry history forward is to create something worthy of the soil that holds both its beauty and its burden.

For me, that responsibility has always been connected to another thread that runs deep through my family story: service.

The Carter line moved west generation after generation, but the idea of duty moved with it. Service has appeared in my family in different uniforms and different eras, but always with the same quiet understanding that the ground beneath us was shaped by those willing to protect it.

My maternal grandmother wore a United States Navy WAVES uniform during World War II, serving her country before most women were expected to do anything of the kind. My maternal grandfather crossed the Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary to serve in the United States Army. My paternal grandfather served in the Navy.

My father graduated from the United States Naval Academy, walked beneath a sword arch on his wedding day, married my mother in his dress whites, and later built a distinguished career as a nuclear physicist.

Years later, my husband would follow that same thread of service into the United States Army and deploy to Afghanistan. With tears streaming down my face, I stood in a hangar and watched him walk away, and in that moment I understood something essential about the word home.

Home is the person you are waiting to return.

Home is the place that holds the people you love.

Home is the ground beneath your feet that generations before you helped defend.

I became a professor because I believe knowledge is one of the most powerful tools a person can carry. I make candles because something in me has always needed to create — to shape something with my hands that carries meaning beyond its physical form.

Then, I stepped into a trade shop in Colonial Williamsburg.

Handmade soap sat on wooden shelves much like it would have three hundred years ago. Standing there, surrounded by the scent of old crafts and living history, the separate threads of my life suddenly tied themselves together.

The lineage.
The land.
The need to make.
The search for home.
The girl on the back road driving toward the battlefields.

In that moment, it all became Autumn Laurel & Co.

Not simply a candle company.

A scent house.

An American scent house rooted in centuries of history, two landscapes, and one woman's lifelong journey back to the land that made her.

Stories eventually become places.

Places eventually become fragrance.

Those fragrances become the collections that carry Autumn Laurel forward.

Our collections carry both worlds.

The Colonial Virginia Collection lives along the Tidewater. In the sea spray and bayberry of the Chesapeake. In the smoky hearths of Williamsburg. In colonial gardens and tobacco fields and the York River at dusk.

One of these scents, Liberty's Shore, was created to honor the 250th anniversary of American independence and the shores where the Revolutionary War reached its final turning point.

The Appalachian Collection rises into the mountains. Into the Blue Ridge that has stood just beyond my horizon my entire life. Into cider mills, orchard air, woodsmoke, and the cold quiet of high country mornings.

Two landscapes. Rooted in Tidewater history. Hand-poured in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

One lineage. One scent house.

Home Is Where Stories Continue.

Autumn Laurel & Co. was never created simply to sell candles.

It was created to preserve places.

To honor history honestly.

To celebrate the changing seasons.

To remember the people who came before us while creating new traditions for those who come next.

Every candle we pour, every fragrance we develop, and every collection we release carries that same hope—that somewhere, in someone's home, a familiar scent will become part of their own story.

Because home is never just a place.

It is the people we love.

The memories we carry.

The traditions we choose to continue.

And sometimes...

it begins with something as simple as lighting a candle.

Autumn Laurel & Co.
An American Scent House
From Tidewater Virginia to the Appalachian Frontier

autumnlaurel.com
@autumnlaurel_co

Thank you for allowing Autumn Laurel to become a small part of your story.