ASHEVILLE, N.C. — A wedding photo of a young Asheville couple has gone viral on Memorial Day weekend.
The photo, posted on Dwayne Schmidt Photography’s Facebook page Saturday night, had about 500 likes by Sunday morning. After News 13 posted it to its Facebook page, it had more than 50,000 combined likes only 24 hours later.
21-year-old U.S. Marine Corps Corporal Caleb Earwood and Maggie Edwards got married on Saturday at Camp Daniel Boone in Canton. Before the wedding, Caleb told photographer Dwayne Schmidt that he wanted to say a prayer with Maggie before the ceremony.
“We were raised in church our whole life,” said Caleb. “In marriage, that’s the first step in our life together, so we wanted to start with a prayer to make sure the first step in our marriage was for God.”
Family drove Caleb up to the cabin where Maggie was getting ready with her bridesmaids.
“He walked into a room full of girls and you could tell he was already nervous,” said Schmidt. “We got him situated on the steps, then we brought her out, and my wife Donna helped them hold hands. And as soon as they grabbed hands, they started crying. I looked at Caleb and said okay, and he started saying a prayer for them, for our country, for their marriage. It was just pretty special, everybody in the room was crying. And I’m trying not to cry so I could take the picture.”
“Everyone was crying, you could really feel everything,” said Maggie. “If you would have been there you would have known. It was special, very precious. It was a very special moment for me just to be able to know that I’m with someone that believes the same way I do, grew up the same way I did. The way he prayed for us really touched my heart.”
Caleb and Maggie knew each other throughout high school at T.C. Roberson, but they didn’t start dating until after they graduated in 2012 and Caleb joined the Marines.
“We had class all four years of high school together, we’d hang out at school a lot,” said Caleb. “Then once I joined the Marine Corps, I was in my unit and we started talking. I came home one time and we hung out, then we started dating.”
The couple got engaged last year, and after their wedding Saturday, took their honeymoon to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. They’ve been shocked by all the attention from the photo.
“I thought it was awesome!” Maggie said, from the line in front of Dollywood on Monday. “Wow, he really really captured it, how we looked and how we felt. It was amazing, but I never expected it. I saw 500 people liked it and I thought ‘oh that’s cool’, then it kept getting bigger and bigger and I was like oh my gosh, this is crazy!”
Caleb has been in the Marines for three years, and been deployed to Okinawa, Korea and the Philippines. He comes from a military family: his brother was in the Marines for four years and did two combat deployments to Afghanistan. He is now in the reserves. By the time the wedding came around, the brothers hadn’t seen each other for a year and a half.
“After we put on our dress blues, we were sitting there getting ready and he told me ‘I’m so proud of you'”, said Caleb.
The couple said they didn’t realize when they originally picked the date that it was Memorial Day weekend, until they had trouble finding a venue.
“I had no idea. I tried to change it, but with everything going on we couldn’t change the date,” said Maggie.
“It also worked out in our favor,” said Caleb. “Because it’s hard for me and my buddies to get off work being in the Marine Corps. So [this weekend] we get a 96, which means you get 96 hours off, which is 4 days off. That gave them enough time to go to the wedding and support us. So I had a bunch of my buddies there, which was awesome.”
As amazing as that moment is, it almost didn’t happen.
“I’d gotten sick Wednesday night,” said Schmidt, just 3 days before he was scheduled to photograph the wedding. “I had severe pain in my side. I pretty much knew what it was because I’d had kidney stones before. I went to the ER, and they sent me back home on medicine. Thursday morning they went in and cut the stone out. I called some guys I know who do photography to see if they could do the wedding, and they could, and I knew they’d do a good job. But Friday came and I thought ‘hey, I wanna do this wedding’.”
Schmidt has only been a professional photographer for three years, and has already won numerous awards, as well as being published in tourism books and magazines. He says he’s already booked for weddings through August, but his phone has been ringing for more gigs in the past few days.
Caleb and Maggie will return from their honeymoon later this week, and plan to move to a house near Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where Caleb is stationed.
Email Evan Donovan, or follow him on Twitter and Facebook.Asheville Wedding Photo Goes Viral
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