Flat Rock of the Old Time: Letters from the Mountains to the Lowcountry, 1837–1939

FLAT ROCK OF THE OLD TIME

FLAT ROCK

OF THE OLD TIME

Letters from the Mountains to the

Lowcountry, 1837–1939

EDITED BY

Robert B. Cuthbert

© 2016 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN 978-1-61117-646-9 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-61117-647-6 (ebook)

Front cover photograph of Flat Rock, NC,

courtesy of the Library of Congress.

For A.L.C.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Editorial Note

Cast of Characters

Genealogies

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Twenty years ago at the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston, I opened for the first time a box of letters from members of the Middleton-Cheves family. I’ve been returning to those boxes ever since. These two families, connected by marriage, were, in the nineteenth century, large coastal rice planters. To escape the dreaded malarial fever and the exhausting summer heat, they sought refuge in the Appalachian settlement of Flat Rock, North Carolina. The families were prodigious correspondents, keeping in touch with Charleston by weekly—often, daily—letters, and they religiously saved every one, amounting to thousands, covering the period from 1837 to 1939, a family history of a century.

Mostly for the reading pleasure, I began copying some of these letters in notebooks, but also to please my friend Elise Pinckney, a Charlestonian who since childhood had spent summers at Flat Rock with her family at Hemlocks on Rutledge Drive. She and I took many excursions in those delightful summer days in the mountains—picnics and hikes. That is how I came to know Flat Rock. It was Lise who guided my hand with an affection I will never forget.

My notebooks began to fill, and in the winter of 2010 I had the idea for producing a book of letters. Karen Stokes, the archivist at the South Carolina Historical Society and a published author and authority on the Civil War, offered to type the letters from my pencil copies with their erratic punctuation, spelling, and ellipses. With her patience and persistence, 233 pages appeared, and I felt we had made a book; Karen was truly its godmother.

I’ve known Steve Hoffius almost forty years. He too is a published author, an editor, and a partner in a publishing company. There came a period when the typed manuscript required a bit of polishing. The essential message veered away into verbiage that lost the reader’s interest. Steve, with a skilled ear, knew when to save the pulp in a paragraph and discard the rind. We spent many hours in the surgical procedure to keep our letters vibrant and yet faithful to the writers’ intentions. To chronologically arrange a book of letters in which many are undated, where only internal information may hint at the year, is to face hours of speculation and uncertainty. That was a great challenge. Steve took on the onerous labor of shaping the structure of the book by chapters, arranged for maps and photographs, and negotiated with the requirements of the publisher, never with impatience or discord: I have no words to express my appreciation.

Many Saturday mornings were spent at the South Carolina Historical Society. The staff were wonderfully helpful, friendly, and tolerant of my slow paper-and-pencil style while laptops worked all around me. I have forgotten many names, but those I remember I think of as family members, especially Susan Dick Hoffius, Lisa Hayes, Karen Stokes, Pat Hash, Mike Coker, Neal Polhemus, Pat Kruger, Mary Jo Fairchild, Virginia Ellison, and Molly Inabinett.

I am privileged to use several rare photographs in the book, and other written material, and here acknowledge the generosity of the donors: Elise Pinckney; Mrs. Lawrence Lee, who made copies of correspondence between Langdon Cheves and I’on Lowndes; Mrs. Frank P. Rhett, who provided an image of Daniel Blake of Combahee and the Meadows; Mrs. A. B. Peterson, for the photograph of a painting of John Parker’s Rockworth; Mrs. Philip Ambler, for an image of Frederick Rutledge; Mrs. Thomas Pinckney, for giving permission for the use of Captain Thomas Pinckney’s reminiscences; Henry Burke, for a Lowndes family genealogy; Dr. Alexander Moore, for his own notes on Flat Rock; John Cudd of Hendersonville, for generously sharing information he had gathered on Farmer’s Inn; and the Henderson County Public Library, for the images of Judge Mitchell King and Mr. McAlpin’s house. I am grateful to Paul F. Rossmann for his skillful laying out of the two maps included here, essential contributions to this volume.

My own good fortune at the South Carolina Room of the Charleston County Public Library led me to Lish Thompson, Linda Bennett, Dot Glover, and Molly French. These charming ladies instructed me in the wizardry of the perpetual calendar and the riches of the Internet.

An inordinate amount of my time was spent in the offices of the register of mesne conveyance in Hendersonville and Asheville, North Carolina—a necessity, a challenge, a frustration, but mostly a final reward, with a willing staff at hand.

Editorial Note

The letters in this volume have been divided into eight chapters arranged chronologically. An introductory heading reflects the new material, community news, and the affairs of the summer people. Unless noted otherwise, all the letters are among the collections of the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston. Occasional gaps appear in the chronology of the letters—for instance, from 1852 to 1862. Dr. Charles M. Cheves bought Acton Briars in 1854 and died in December of the following year. He left a wife, Isabella, and four children, none older than seven. Later, Acton Briars would be the source of the bulk of this correspondence, but not yet. Also, no letters appear between 1866 and 1870 because so many lowcountry families had lost virtually all their male heads of households in the Civil War. Women and children would not have stayed in Flat Rock by themselves. For decades, though, the households were dominated by women and most of these letters—the news and gossip, the viewpoints and perspectives—are theirs.

The letters have been edited to reflect the changes in Flat Rock and in the families resident there. A great deal of the correspondence was intensely personal—health woes, inquiries as to individuals’ travel plans—and much of this has been removed, the excisions identified by ellipses. Unedited, all these letters would fill double these pages, and while the editor has enjoyed perusing all of them, he has chosen not to inflict them on the reader. Likewise, a multivolume set would be necessary to hold the full correspondence. Paragraph breaks have occasionally been inserted for easier reading. Misspellings have not been corrected. Salutations have been removed to save space.

Unfortunately, many of the letters from Isabella Cheves to her son Langdon in the 1880s and 1890s were not dated, and are here dated cautiously, based when possible on their interior information. Isabella’s preference for pencil and cheap tablet paper has presented a challenge not easily mastered. Legibility varies among the correspondents—Langdon’s writings are clear until he passes his eighth decade—and occasional inscrutable words are replaced with the word illegible in brackets.

In this introduction and in the notes to the correspondence, reference is often made to land transactions: so many acres were purchased one year and resold another year. All of that information was gained from years spent searching through the records maintained by the register of mesne conveyance, primarily in Hendersonville, Henderson County, North Carolina.

INTRODUCTION

They were a grand race those gentlemen of the old time. Self willed and overbearing perhaps, but with no meanness or paltryness about them. Theirs was the strength of the lion.

Langdon Cheves, 27 October 1905, on hearing

of the death of Richard Henry Lowndes (1815–1905)

A BRIEF HISTORY OF OLD FLAT ROCK AND ITS PEOPLE

A traveler in the early 1800s coming up from South Carolina to the crest of the Blue Ridge would have discovered a country of great natural beauty and an invigorating climate. Scattered settlers had already cleared home sites among these rich forests of pine, hemlock, and oak. A small farm was identified by a tight log cabin or house, with a cow, a horse, chickens, and a few pigs, along with a modest orchard of plum and cherry, and several rows of corn, potatoes, cabbage, and beans. A little distance away, Kalmia and rhododendrons sheltered a fast stream of pure water. Along the threaded creeks of the flatlands, the soil was particularly fertile and suited for crops. Neighbors lived some distance away. Dirt roads cut through the woods, disappearing over the undulating countryside. While the far views of high mountains might tempt the dreamer, the settler’s life was too severe to yield to romanticizing.

As the settlement grew, there was need for a geographical identity, and the name chosen, an obvious one, was Flat Rock, for the several acres of bare granite coming to the surface on both sides of the main road. When travelers reached the rock, they were in Flat Rock. Until recently, Native Americans had used the site for ceremonies, but they were now almost entirely gone, moved west first by the Treaty of Hopewell in 1785 and finally in the Trail of Tears in 1838. In 1931 Langdon Cheves, who had spent time at Flat Rock since before the Civil War, replied to an inquiry, No Indians at Flat Rock in my time, except Cooper’s and the last of the Mohicans!¹

The earliest known commercial enterprise in Flat Rock was Colonel John Earle’s grist mill on Earle’s Creek, established in 1791. Earle (1737–1804), a native of Virginia, moved to the Spartanburg, South Carolina, area before the American Revolution. According to author Virginia Meynard, Earle built the famous Saluda Gap Road, and obtained land patents for much of the area that was to become Flat Rock. Earle’s mill was located on what is now Jordan Creek. Another early community need was satisfied by Kuykendall’s Tavern, dating to about 1800, and located on the old state road (the present Rutledge Drive), servicing all travelers, drovers, and the road weary. Just west of the tavern was Mud Creek Baptist Church, which had an active congregation by 1805. Early records mention few sites, but we may imagine also the sound of the hammer and anvil at the blacksmith’s and, in the distance, the whining buzz of the saw.²

The lands west of the Blue Ridge, going into Tennessee and Kentucky, were ideally suited to livestock, but the larger markets were far to the east, principally in South Carolina and Georgia, and the lack of adequate roads in that direction stymied trade and profit in both directions. A journey on horseback from the mountains to the coast took at least ten days and much longer by carriage.³

In 1815 Joel Roberts Poinsett (1771–1851), a Charlestonian of exceptional mental and physical energies, returning through western North Carolina from a tour of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, Kentucky, and Tennessee, recognized the value in trade these regions could bring to the Port of Charleston if an improved road were constructed connecting the Blue Ridge to the coast. Poinsett is credited with planning and implementing the building of this road, from upper South Carolina through Saluda Gap to the North Carolina state line, then into Buncombe County. The Buncombe Turnpike, as it came to be called, opened to traffic in 1827. Sadie Patton wrote that the turnpike was to mean more in the development of the western part of North Carolina than any other factor in its history.⁴ By 1830 the road extended to Asheville and, following the French Broad River, eventually reached Hot Springs in Madison County before crossing into Tennessee.

In the years following, many thousand horses, mules, cattle, sheep, and pigs, as well as turkey and geese, moved down the turnpike from the Blue Ridge and beyond, advancing on foot eight or ten miles a day. A trip to the coast might take six weeks, requiring taverns and corrals along the way for man and beast. In Flat Rock one such accommodation was located at the foot of Butt Mountain. Another, known as Brittens, later taken over by George Summey, was on the main road in Flat Rock, set well back from the traffic at what is now the entrance to Little Hill, the Henry Laurens place.

Built for commerce, the turnpike was also the most convenient approach to Buncombe for the South Carolina planter escaping summer heat, humidity, malaria, and the deadly yellow fever. However, even with improvements the road was narrow, heavily rutted, winding, and, in places, treacherous. The journey by horse or carriage still took a week to ten days. The stage from Greenville to Flat Rock jostled the confined passengers for ten or twelve hours before arriving at its destination. But those first breaths of Champagne air (so christened by Charlestonians) made the tedious journey worthwhile.⁵

The earliest of the lowcountry planters to acquire land for summer homes in this area of Buncombe County were Daniel Blake (at French Broad) in 1826, Charles Baring in 1828, Frederick Rutledge and Judge Mitchell King in 1829, and Henry McAlpin of Savannah, Georgia, in 1833.

In October 1828 Charles Baring and his wife, Susan (the early deed was in her name), acquired two hundred acres on the waters of Earl’s Creek on both sides of Saluda road east of Mud Creek meeting house. When Susan Baring made her will in 1830, she gave as her place of residence The Mountain Lodge, Buncombe County, North Carolina. Between 1828 and 1843, Mr. Baring was to expand his holdings to a total of 2,433 acres. He did so with a retinue of sixty slaves in attendance.⁶

But it is Susan Baring (1763–1845) who draws our attention, for to quote Christopher Memminger, she had her own way in everything.⁷ No individual among the early Carolinians was so compelling as Mrs. Baring (the name is pronounced bearing). She was a woman with a sketchy background, who by her first marriage and early widowhood was made an heiress and, with an extraordinary capacity for self-invention, was able to assume the role of a grande dame and convincingly play the part for nearly half a century.

Most of what we know of Mrs. Baring’s early life is taken from James Heyward’s family history, Heyward, perhaps a biased source.⁸ She was a charmer. Born Susan Cole in Wales in 1763, she gained scant education but succeeded in luring into marriage James Heyward (1764–1796), a wealthy, aristocratic South Carolina rice planter in 1794. He died two years later, leaving his widow a life interest in the income of three valuable coastal plantations on the Combahee River: Antwerp, Copenhagen, and Hamburg. Two years after Heyward’s death, Susan took a second husband, Charles Baring of the family of English bankers.

From the outset the Heywards were suspicious of this woman. Nathaniel, James’s brother and the designated heir to those three plantations at Susan’s death, instructed his agent in London to examine the records in the English courts for any irregularity in James’s marriage that might invalidate the union with Susan, and therefore her right of inheritance. The hoped-for flaw was not found. What came to light, however, was Susan’s private life: before her marriage to James, she apparently had been mistress of five other men, none of whom made her his wife. Moreover, she came from a poor class of tradespeople, her father having been a butcher. These revelations provided Nathaniel with sufficient cause to forbid the ladies of his household (who lived on neighboring plantations) from having any social contact with Susan. Nathaniel’s edict was insult enough to Mrs. Baring that her husband sent a challenge to Heyward. The two men, with pistols, met on neutral ground between their respected properties. Shots were fired, but there were no injuries. The date of the affair is unknown, but doubtless the sting of circulating gossip made Susan uncomfortable, hastening her move to Flat Rock.⁹

Following Susan’s marriage to Charles Baring, three of her relatives appeared in America. Mrs. Baring claimed Dr. Henry Tudor Farmer as her nephew. He had studied medicine in England, and late in this country developed an interest in writing and theater, which took him to New York and an association with a cosmopolitan group of writers and intellectuals, Washington Irving among them. Dr. Farmer died in 1828, before the Barings’ move to Flat Rock, but one of his sons, Henry Tudor Farmer, known as Squire Farmer of Farmer’s Hotel (now Woodfield Inn), settled in Flat Rock. A valuable citizen, beyond operating the hotel he built local houses and operated a furniture factory. The squire was also something of an ombudsman in the community, and for a time the magistrate. A number of letters in this volume refer to his usefulness to the public. He died in 1883 at the age of sixty-three.

Adolphus Tudor, a member of Mrs. Baring’s Mountain Lodge family, and an original communicant of St. John in the Wilderness, remains an obscure figure. The same must be said of Dr. Frederick B. Tudor, who died in 1814 and is buried not far from the Barings’ Combahee plantations. An engraved poem on his stone, a mother’s lament on the loss of a son, suggests Susan’s hand. She claimed no children, but the suspicion that Adolphus and Frederick Tudor were her sons has never been put to rest. She was a complex woman who concealed a turbulent past.

Another major figure in early Flat Rock was Mitchell King (1783–1862). He held the belief that a country could not prosper without an educated population and a vibrant exchange of commerce, and these principles guided his public life. Born in Crail, Scotland, as a youth he was a passionate reader, a student of the classics and mathematics, his early interest in medicine giving way to a study of commerce.

At age twenty-two King set off from London for the port of Charleston. It is not known whether he had personal contacts in the city, but with confidence and determination he opened a small private school; that soon led to an assistant teaching position at the College of Charleston and a prompt elevation to principal (a position equivalent to president) in 1809. King was at the college six or seven months only but later recalled this time as the most useful period of his life. He possessed a capacious memory, an accomplishment he attributed to writing down a synopsis of the material he had just read and comparing it to the original, and repeating the exercise until he had mastered the challenge. He would have been a superb teacher, but as a profession he chose the law, studied for it, and by 1810 was admitted to the South Carolina Bar, focusing on nautical and mercantile affairs. His income in time grew to be one of the largest in the state.¹⁰

In 1842 King was elected recorder and judge of Charleston city courts, and he was thereafter known as Judge King. Recognized for his sense of civic responsibility, in 1817 he was named a trustee of the College of Charleston, and in 1837 was honored by the Medical College of South Carolina with the position of president of the board of trustees (equivalent to the office of president). Both the College of Charleston and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill awarded him the degree of Doctor of Law in 1857.

Commerce first brought Judge King to western North Carolina in 1829, as he foresaw the vast benefits of trade if the regions west of North Carolina extending to the Mississippi Valley could be linked, first by roads and later by rail, to the southeast coast. King was in Asheville in 1832 supporting such a rail line, and in 1837 in Knoxville, Tennessee, on the same mission—this at a time when even adequate roads crossing the mountains were primitive. In her 1906 book, Charleston: The Place and the People, Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel wrote of Judge King, He had made himself by force of intellect, learning, and character, one of [the city’s] most prominent and valued citizens.¹¹

Judge King bought his first Flat Rock property, 250 acres on Mud Creek, in October 1829, and he continued adding to his estate, so that by 1843 it amounted to 7,852 acres. His home, Argyle, was underway by 1830 but not completed until about 1837, when the Count de Choiseul wrote him to say, It gives me much pleasure to inform you that your house is at last in the way of being completed.¹² Twice married to successive Campbell sisters and father to eighteen children, eleven of whom lived to maturity, he is buried with his wives in the First (Scots) Presbyterian churchyard in Charleston.

One story of Judge King, shared with the editor of this volume by a Charlestonian who spent decades in Flat Rock, will give an idea of his personality. This informant said that when Judge King was president of the College of Charleston, as was the custom then he gave the morning prayer service to the assembled students. On the lectern, the Bible was housed in a handsome box, a heavy silk ribbon marking the place in the text. Judge King announced the reading of Psalm 119, opened the box and found that the students had filled it with old newspapers. Without a hint that anything was wrong, he began to recite the text just as if he were reading it and he recited the entire psalm from memory. My friend continued, Now if you knew your Bible—she knew that I didn’t—you’d know that 119 is the longest in the book, and he never said a word about the students’ deception.¹³

Daniel Blake (1803–1873) acquired 990 acres on Cane Creek at French Broad (Fletcher), about twelve miles from Flat Rock, in 1826. His estate, known as the Meadows, would eventually grow to 7,000 acres, but he owned even more—a total of more than 22,000 acres in Buncombe and Henderson Counties. The Blakes were English; the first of the family came to Charleston in 1680. Early on they were large property owners and rice planters. The Blake plantation, Board House, on the Combahee River south of Charleston encompassed 11,000 acres, 450 of those prime tideland rice fields, the source of the family wealth. Mr. Blake was born in England and took his education in the mother country, and there is good reason to believe that Buncombe’s pleasant climate and landscape reminded him of England. He preferred the mountains to the coast, settling his family at the Meadows. Several generations of Blakes are buried at Calvary Church in Fletcher, a church the family established.

There is a credible story within the Rutledge family about Daniel Blake and Frederick Rutledge passing through Buncombe County in 1825 or 1826. They were on their way to Franklin, Tennessee, to visit the family of Henry Middleton Rutledge, who had moved there in 1816, and whose two daughters were to become the brides of the two gentlemen. On their return to Charleston, Blake and Rutledge spoke with such enthusiasm for the Blue Ridge to their friends that the two of them, Judge King and Charles Baring, made the trip to see this fabled land for themselves, and others followed.

The original house at the Meadows burned in 1867; the present stone dwelling was built in 1884 by Daniel Blake’s son Robert.¹⁴ The property was sold out of the family in 1925 for a reputed $90,000. The garden, a grouping of enormous boxwood, among the largest in the country, and the house are now surrounded by warehouses and light industry and confined to a fragment of the original land. What is to become of this property endangered by unsympathetic zoning laws?

Frederick Rutledge (1800–1884) bought a 340-acre tract in Flat Rock, later known as Brooklands, in 1829, selling it in 1835, by then 270 acres, to Charles Edmondston of Charleston. The 70-acre difference is not explained, nor is it known whether Rutledge held other property in the community. He died in Flat Rock in 1884. Two of his charming daughters, Lise Rutledge and Sara Rutledge Pinckney, however, made their home at Rutledge Cottage. Their personalities illuminate numerous letters.

Henry McAlpin (1771–1851) of the Hermitage in Savannah, Georgia, was an architect by training and an early industrialist. He manufactured brick on a large scale in addition to operating iron foundries supplying materials for a growing Savannah. Two rice plantations on Argyle Island made him a neighbor of Judge King. McAlpin was too active in business to remain at Flat Rock, so it is no surprise that his appearance in Buncombe was brief. He bought land on the waters of Mud Creek and on both sides of Mill Creek in 1833, apparently 300 acres, from Gideon Stephens. Three years later he sold this property to Mr. Baring in two parcels, 138 acres and 165 acres. On the latter a house or other substantial structure was erected at this time, giving support to the belief that McAlpin was the builder of Dolce Far Niente. With the sale of 300 acres to Charles Baring, McAlpin divested himself of all his Flat Rock land, returned to Savannah, and is not mentioned again in the records.¹⁵

Joel Poinsett’s road across upper South Carolina, connecting with North Carolina at the state line, and the Buncombe Turnpike, going through Saluda Gap to the crest of the Blue Ridge, opened to traffic at about the same time, in 1827 and 1828 respectively. These improvements encouraged lowcountry Carolinians to make the 250-mile escape from heat and mosquitoes. A further incentive was the report of a future rail line advancing west from Charleston, making a summer home at Flat Rock an increasingly wise investment. Charleston travelers could get to both Greenville and Spartanburg by rail in 1859. No other community in the mountains was as convenient to reach as Flat Rock.

When, after the disruption of war, attention turned again to extending the railroad into North Carolina, it was decided, because of the shorter distance, to route the line from Spartanburg to Saluda, then on to Hendersonville, and eventually Asheville. The Spartanburg and Asheville Railroad Company was organized in 1873, and cutting and blasting soon began in earnest. Between Melrose and Saluda the rise of 4.7 percent, or sixty feet per mile, made it the steepest mainline grade in the United States.¹⁶ It crested at Saluda in 1878, reaching East Flat Rock and Hendersonville in 1879. The Charleston businessman could now come and go conveniently between his mountain home and office in town. The new citizens would be not just planters but lawyers and bankers and those with large interests in textiles or cotton.

No period in Flat Rock’s history was more unsettling than the Civil War years of 1861–1865. People in the mountains were divided in their loyalties. Of the seventy mountain counties, only two—Henderson and Yancey—voted in favor of a state secession convention. In Madison County, the proposal to secede was defeated by a vote of 144–28. Ultimately, while twenty thousand mountain men and boys enlisted with the Confederacy, eight thousand signed up with the federals.¹⁷

There were tensions and feuds because of race or class. The lowcountry people, who were often rather insular, clearly had resources that the locals lacked: they left home for months at a time, brought servants, and expected to hire others from the community, sometimes haggling for lower wages. How could resentments not have grown? The vast majority of mountain residents were white, but the numbers of African Americans varied widely, from 2 to 25 percent, depending on the county. In Henderson County, the number was about 15 percent, but it may have doubled in the summer months when lowcountry residents arrived with their servants.¹⁸

Although the Flat Rock settlement was spared active military engagements, by the summer of 1864 the neighboring countryside witnessed a serious disruption of civic society. Hopes for a southern victory were tenuous, and many soldiers, long absent from home and weary, knew it and began slipping away. Numbers of these exhausted troops passed through Henderson County in need of horses and corn, provisions that the Carolinians, hard up themselves, could not provide. Along with them was a dangerous element of local men who from early on had resented the privileged lowcountry people and their retinues of servants. Houses were broken into, valuables and horses stolen, and their owners threatened with assault. Flat Rock was no longer safe. When in June 1864 Andrew Johnstone of Beaumont was murdered, the South Carolinians who had the means to leave did so. For those who stayed, as Archibald Hamilton Seabrook explains in a November 1864 letter included in this volume, attacks and killings continued.

The destruction of property and wealth in the lowcountry at the end of the war required the summer people on their return to Flat Rock to exercise closer economy. Children and grandchildren lessened the pain of family losses, and in time new people moved into the community. Those with new money and extravagant ways amused the old residents. When people got on their feet again, a period of extended tranquility settled in, lasting some four decades. After 1900, however, the promotion of the Blue Ridge, particularly Asheville, as a healthful area, brought an inflow of tourists and automobiles, and the peaceful rural life that defined old Flat Rock came to an end.

After the First World War and into the early 1920s, a sense of relief and optimism took hold of the country’s imagination. The automobile now in general use offered people mobility they had not before enjoyed. The older generation of Flat Rock’s summer crowd was passing, and new people, new ideas, and new money were moving civilization forward. With large profits to be made in land speculation, the southern Blue Ridge was caught in a real-estate boom as civic leaders promoted the region’s therapeutic benefits. Local populations, visitors, and new citizens alike drove up land values, setting off a mania for buying and selling real estate.

By the time land speculation subsided in Henderson County, old Flat Rock itself was fading away. The town of Flat Rock would eventually thrive, and some of the lowcountry community would remain, but the close-knit neighborhoods of cousins—when porch visits and trips to the post office occupied much of the days’ activities—would not survive.

THE MAIN CAST OF CHARACTERS OF THE LETTERS

In the century between 1837 and 1939, thousands of letters passed from Flat Rock to Charleston. Nearly all but the earliest letters included here were sent from Acton Briars, the Cheves family summer home. Our story is taken from that long correspondence.

The editor of these old letters has himself grown old musing over their contents and stepping into a past that is to him, and he hopes to the reader, alive with vibrant individuals waiting to be resurrected, telling us of Flat Rock in the old times.

The letters are from the Cheves and Middleton family collections of the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston, housed in forty linear feet of letterboxes. Gathered together are three generations of personal and business correspondence, genealogical material, drawings, maps, plats, and historical memoranda.

This book contains, of course, but a fraction of the whole, selected for specific references to life in Flat Rock, from the early years of the summer settlement by lowcountry South Carolinians and terminating at the end of the 1930s, by which time old Flat Rock had been transformed into a faster, more modern place. The tranquil manner of living that brought so many people to the Blue Ridge in the first place could not survive the resort era and the passing of the old crowd.

With few exceptions, these letters were written by members of the Middleton and Cheves families. Acton Briars on Cheves Hill was a property firmly in Flat Rock when the family lived there but now just across the line in Hendersonville. Cheves Hill has lost its identity, but it begins at the intersection of the Hendersonville Highway and Pond Road (to use the old name), today the location of Pinecrest Presbyterian Church, rising in elevation beyond the church and extending northward, past Wistonia, a part of the old property, to the hill’s descent at the creek just beyond what is now Charlestown Drive; the whole comes to about eighty acres.

In 1849 Charles Baring built the house (later named Acton Briars by the Cheves family) as a temporary residence after giving up Mountain Lodge and before his new home, Solitude, was completed. In 1854 Baring sold Acton Briars to Dr. Charles Manly Cheves, who died the following year, leaving his widow, Isabella Middleton Cheves, and four children: Langdon, born in 1848; Harriott, born in 1849; Henry, born in 1851; and Isabella, born in 1853. The household would soon include Isabella’s mother, Mrs. Henry Augustus Middleton, and two unmarried sisters, Harriott and Alice Middleton. Although Acton Briars was a summer house, during the Civil War, when the South Carolina coast was threatened with invasion, the women and children lived there year round. It was from Acton Briars that Harriott Middleton sent her spirited letters to her cousin Susan Middleton (see chapter two).

The Cheves family would in time expand to include in-laws and grandchildren. When Isabella’s daughter, Isabella Williams, died in 1888, her four little girls, Caroline (b. 1878), Isabel (b. 1879), Harriott (b. 1884), and Alice (b. 1887), were taken in by their grandmother, who gave them a home as long as she lived.

Isabella Cheves spent some sixty summers at Flat Rock, knew all the low-country families and many of the local people, kept up with community news, and never failed to report on Flat Rock’s weather, new households, and, of course, all that was going on in the family. A voluminous correspondence accumulated over the years, most of it to her son Langdon. If they were separated for any length of time, a letter was in the mail, and Langdon apparently saved every one; the bond between them was singular and indestructible.

Langdon Cheves came of distinguished antecedents. His paternal grandfather, Judge Langdon Cheves (1770–1857), was a successful rice planter at Delta plantation on the Savannah River, and a political leader in state and national affairs. In 1816 the state General Assembly elected him an associate judge of the state. Judge Cheves’s national reputation, however, was earned as president of the Bank of the United States (1815–18), during a period when extravagant speculation in southern cotton, followed by a collapse in the market and widespread default, imperiled the country’s entire banking system. Judge Cheves, using his authority to restrain the supply of loose money, calmed the markets, preventing a financial breakdown. Historian A. V. Huff has called Judge Cheves, after John C. Calhoun, the most prominent South Carolinian in government in his day.¹⁹

Henry Augustus Middleton (1793–1887), the maternal grandfather of our correspondent Langdon Cheves, was not a political man, devoting his energies to rice planting at Weehaw plantation on the Black River in the Georgetown District of South Carolina. The value of that property in 1850 made him one of the wealthiest planters in the state. Owning no Flat Rock property, he preferred the social life in Newport, Rhode Island, where he had a house near the Cliffs (still standing but moved) and a number of investment properties.

Our Langdon Cheves, grandson of the judge, eccentric and rich in old age, was responsible for the myriad historical records in the Middleton and Cheves collections of the South Carolina Historical Society. He preserved not only accounts of the past, but every type of written material crossing his desk; nothing was discarded. Charleston author John Bennett, himself no mean collector, referred to Cheves as an eccentric of the first water, an historical magpie.²⁰

Called Lang by close contemporaries, he spent his boyhood years in Flat Rock, which he recorded in drawings and watercolor paintings. Both were evidence of a talent that later worked into superb calligraphy and lists of native birds, the harvest of hunting expeditions in the woods of Henderson County with his cousin De Lancey Middleton, like himself a refugee from the coast. The boys shot everything from songbirds to game. The good conservationist of today cringes at their profligate use of the gun.²¹

Every man was needed for the Confederate army, and Langdon, like all other teenaged boys, had heroic imagery stirring in the brain. Sixteen years old in 1865, he enlisted in the Seventh South Carolina Cavalry with a cousin, Allen Wardlaw, and they left for Virginia, reaching their destination in April, only to discover that the fighting was over.

We know little of Langdon’s schooling at Flat Rock, just hints of instruction from elders in the home, and that in an informal manner. Nevertheless, when he returned home he was accepted at the College of Charleston. An excellent student, he graduated with full honors in 1871. Quick in mathematics and adept as a draftsman, he gained a position as a topographer with the Central of Georgia Railroad, surveying a line near Macon, Georgia. The heat was oppressive and the working conditions exhausting. It required little urging from his mother, Isabella, to bring him home. She emphasized the need for a man in the family to look after business affairs, in particular the Cheves rice plantations. Her suggestion, which he followed, was to study law and practice among his friends.

Langdon, confessing a distaste for appearing before a jury, was taken into the office of Gen. James Conner, a family friend, and assigned the essential work of preparing evidence, advising on points of law, and administering deeds and trusts. While law was to be his profession, Lang’s great interests were the early history of his native state and the individuals who made those years exceptional. Indifferent to society in general, he was content with private hours investigating records of the past and putting his discoveries on paper, page upon page in his exquisite penmanship; there were no idle hours in his days.²²

At age forty, Langdon surprised his family by announcing his engagement to Sophie Haskell, his first cousin and his senior by three years. She had been part of the Acton Briars household since her student days at the Misses de Choiseul’s school in the 1860s. Langdon and Sophie were married in the spring of 1889. Poor Sophie, with marriage, envisioned a comfortable, attractive home, welcoming to her friends, and an active social life. But Langdon, whom she had known for years, cared little for company, and with age came to resent domestic expenses above the absolutely essential. This was at a time when he had money; Langdon’s frugality was almost pathological. As Sophie would tell him near the end of her life, That accursed money which you say you care nothing for and yet to which you sacrifice yourself and me all the time . . . has nearly ruined our married life.²³

Isabella Cheves died in 1912, and Langdon came into possession of the house and most of the land at Acton Briars; his brother Henry owned a house and several acres of his own, where in later years he built Wistonia. Sophie continued to spend summers at Flat Rock, and Langdon, as he had always done, came up in the fall, his favorite season. Without his mother and her grandchildren, now grown and separated from Acton Briars, the place lost its youthful spirit, aging with its inhabitants.

Sophie, who had suffered for several years with advancing heart failure, died in Charleston in the spring of 1922. Restless and unsettled, Langdon was back in Flat Rock that fall. He was there again briefly the year following, when he closed Acton Briars a last time and, as