Heart of the Blue Ridge: Highlands, North Carolina - Softcover

Shaffner,Randolph P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0971013004 ISBN 13: 9780971013001

Publisher: Faraway Publishing, 2001

Synopsis

Recipient of the NorthCarolina Society of Historians History Book Award, 2002, and the American Association of State and Local History Award, 2005.

About this title

About the Author

Randolph Preston Shaffner, a native of Winston-Salem, N.C., lives and works in Highlands where he established and managed for thirty years Cyrano's Bookshop. Having attended Davidson College, he earned his doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As an educator, he has taught for the U.S. Peace Corps in Thailand, St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Fairfield University in Connecticut, and Western Carolina University at Cullowhee. As an author, he has published, apart from poems and articles, The Apprenticeship Novel, a seminal study of the "Bildungsroman," Good Reading Material, Mostly Bound and New, a history of the Hudson Library in Highlands to benefit the library, an Arcadia Images of America book on Highlands, and The Father of Virginia Military Institute, a biography of Colonel J.T.L. Preston, CSA. Under the name Faraway Publishing, he has published the first and second editions of his Heart of the Blue Ridge, Angie Jenkins' Highlands, North Carolina . . . The Early Years, Jim Green's Satulah, the Mountain, and the Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust's First Creation, a history of the oldest Land Trust in North Carolina. He currently serves as archivist for the Highlands Historical Society.

From the Back Cover

On March 6, 1875, Sam Kelsey and C. C. Hutchinson paid $2 an acre for just over a square mile of the Sugartown Highlands in the Blue Ridge Mountains and began building a town 4,000 feet above the clouds. Perched on the shoulders of Satulah, Fodderstack, Black Rock, Whiteside, and Shortoff Mountains, the Highlands Plateau was shaded by primeval forests of giant hardwoods and pyramidal pines and drained by quiet crystal streams and thundering cataracts that plunged over precipitous crags and down laurel-fringed gorges. Offering restoration of health and soul, this paradisial settlement provided common ground for settlers from both the North and South a decade after their great Civil War. By 1883 three hundred immigrants from twenty-seven Northern and Southern states were calling Highlands home.
This is a history of the origin and growth of a town with a Northern climate set high in the South, including the ever-continuing struggle between those who would preserve and those who would exploit its unique appeal to year-round residents and summer visitors. In its attempt to be all-inclusive, this book contains much detail, but it also embodies a collection of matchless characters and personalities and their stories that have given the town and its history remarkable color and enduring interest. In short, the big world is here mirrored in the small world where little things that happen are no less important, indeed more so.

Edition details

• Publisher: Faraway Publishing
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0971013004
• ISBN 13: 9780971013001
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 737