Cashiers Valley

By Jane Gibson Nardy and Jan Blair Wyatt

Cashiers Valley, enveloped in the Blue Ridge Mountains with craggy stone faces, thundering waterfalls, majestic forests, and wilderness areas of unique flora and fauna, has always drawn visitors.
Its moderate climate, slower pace, and friendly people have encouraged visitors to stay and, increasingly, to relocate. The residents have preserved a strong sense of place as they embraced the bonds of kinship and community through the years. This is all connected to a powerful religious base and a strong cultural heritage tradition. Today Cashiers Valley retains the charm of an isolated mountain village that welcomes guests. The photographs in this volume were gathered from many
local scrapbooks, long forgotten and yellowing with age. Community residents are eager to share their photographs and memories of days gone by.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Aug 15, 2007
• ISBN: 9781439619308

Jane Gibson Nardy

Jane Gibson Nardy, descendant of early Cashiers settler Col. John Zachary, is the historian for the Cashiers Historical Society. A professional genealogist for over 30 years, she is an accomplished regional speaker and writes a monthly column for Laurel Magazine. Jan Blair Wyatt founded the Cashiers Symposium. She is editor of the 26-county Museum in Partnership newsletter and board member of the North Carolina Federation of Historical Societies. Both authors are past presidents of the Cashiers Historical Society and share their knowledge and enthusiasm for Cashiers Valley.

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INTRODUCTION

Cashiers Valley, located high in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, has always been a beautiful, remote, and wild area. Some people still think it is wild, especially when they see a 500-pound bear strolling across their deck or porch. It was part of the Cherokee Nation until the 1819 treaty with the Cherokee tribe. In the mid-1820s, the Barak Norton family received a land grant from the State of North Carolina. They cleared their newly acquired land and began farming in nearby Whiteside Cove. By 1835, the Zacharys and McKinneys had claimed land between the Chattooga River and the mountains of Chimney Top and Rock Mountain.

The following is an account of the Zachary family’s trip from Surry County, North Carolina, some 200 miles away, to the wilderness that would become Cashiers Valley:

The long and tiresome move to this beautiful valley was started in January in a 6-horse wagon with Mrs. Zachary and the smaller children in a carriage. At that time there were no roads through the valley—nothing but Indian trails from the foot of the mountains, on the South Carolina side, to the Tuckasiege River. The family wound their way up the Chattooga Mountain, gutting their way into this valley, surrounded on every side by the wild beasts of the forest. Their post office was Pickens, South Carolina, 31 miles away.

In 1839, Jonathan Zachary was appointed the first postmaster of the Cashiers Valley Post Office.

Those living in the Cashiers Valley farmed, boarded travelers, worked as carpenters, operated general stores, and ran lumber and gristmills. Alexander Zachary’s general store account book, dating from the 1840s, shows that residents bartered eggs, hams, deer skins, and days of work for manufactured items such as nails, rum, cowbells, shoe leather, salt, powder and lead, and all kinds of tools necessary for gold mining. For the first several decades of settlement, there was a working gold mine on the Horsepasture River in Fairfield—today called Sapphire Valley. The Zachary ledger lists employees of the Georgetown Goldmine buying picks and shovels and then paying for them with grains of gold dust or nuggets of gold.

Mountain farmers would sell their extra livestock to professional drovers who would in turn drive the herds to the plantation markets in South Carolina. One of the drovers’ routes came right through Cashiers Valley, which proved to be a good place to stay overnight. Many local families charged a fee to provide the weary drovers a bed to sleep in, a hot meal, and feed and water for the animals. It prepared the folks in the valley for the next wave of visitors—the gentry of South Carolina. Thus began tourism in the area.

The serenity and natural beauty of summer in the Blue Ridge lured the 19th-century Southern aristocratic plantation owners, such as Wade Hampton III, to escape the hot, humid Lowcountry. They boarded with the local families until they bought their own places. The James McKinney house was a frequent stopping place and was remembered in the book The Fogy Days and Now written by David U. Sloan and published in the late 1800s:

We can never forget our first visit to Cashiers Valley, our relish for old Aunt Sally McKinney’s yaller-legged chickens, fried so brown, and floating in the golden melted churned butter, snow-white smothered cabbage, mealy Irish potatoes, cracking wide open as they were lifted from the kettle, buckwheat cakes and mountain honey, nor shall we try to erase from our memory old Mr. Mac’s mountain dew that sat out on the water-shelf, before and after and between meals.

In an effort to develop trade routes between North and South Carolina, William Holland Thomas organized the Tuckasiege and Keowee Turnpike in the 1850s. The road began in South Carolina near today’s Keowee Lake, came up through Cashiers, and then followed the Tuckasiege River (now known as the Tuckasegee) down to the town of Webster, which was the county seat. Alexander Zachary signed his name to the petition requesting the turnpike. All male citizens who lived near the turnpike were required to give a number of days of work each year to keep the road in good repair. Today’s Highway 107, running through Cashiers, roughly follows the original turnpike.

The 1860s were dominated by the Civil War. It was a dark time in the history of Cashiers, as loyalties were sharply split in most families, creating divisions still felt today. While no major battles were fought here, each day became a battle for survival. There were