Chimney Rock Park and Hickory Nut Gorge

By J. Timothy Cole

From the opening of Chimney Rock Park by Jerome Freeman in 1890 to Dr. Lucius Morse s dreams for Lake Lure in the 1920s, the development of tourism in the Hickory Nut Gorge area is one of the untold stories of the region s history. For much of the 19th century, the area was remote and known to few; Freeman was perhaps the first to truly appreciate Chimney Rock s potential, but it took the invention of the automobile and the completion of the Charlotte to Asheville Highway in 1915 for that potential to be fully realized. By the 1920s, Chimney Rock Park and the gorge s hotels and summer camps were known to thousands. In 2007, the State of North Carolina purchased Chimney Rock Park from the Morse family, and a new chapter began.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Jan 2, 2008
• ISBN: 9781439619469

J. Timothy Cole

J. Timothy Cole is a librarian at Greensboro Public Library. His publications include The Rumbling Mountain of Hickory Nut Gap (1990), The Forest City Lynching of 1900 (2003), Collett Leventhorpe, The English Confederate (2007), and articles in Our State and Georgia Backroads. Most of the images herein are from Cole�s own collection, built over many years.

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INTRODUCTION

The scenery of Hickory Nut Gorge (or Gap) is among the most breathtaking of the Blue Ridge and Western North Carolina, and its eastern extremity, where the villages of Chimney Rock, Bat Cave, and Lake Lure lie, is remarkable for its geological wonders and curious history. Here rise two great sentinels: Chimney Rock Mountain to the south and Round Top Mountain to the north, forming a portal or gateway to the Blue Ridge Mountains and beyond. Stupendous granite walls over 500 million years old, monuments to the seemingly timeless constancy of nature, surround the motorist who passes this way on U.S. Highway 74 along the Rocky Broad River.

But these rocks are not really timeless. It seems so only because geologic time passes so much more slowly than our own. The cliffs of the gorge are composed of a rock known to geologists as the Henderson Gneiss, and throughout are faults and closely spaced cracks called joints. During historic times, earthquakes occurred in the gorge, and it is possible that these quakes, as well as others extending back perhaps millions of years, help to explain the presence of the numerous faults. These cracks have in turn led to another process that geologists label differential erosion, meaning the rock adjacent to the faults and cracks has become broken, and water and weathering have worn it away more easily than the surrounding rock. These three interrelated geologic processes—seismic activity, the presence of joints, and differential erosion—combine to account for many of the scenic wonders of the gorge.

The famous Chimney Rock is an excellent case in point. High up on Chimney Rock Mountain, this extraordinary 300-foot monolith looms above us like some man-made tower in the sky. A familiar landmark to many, Chimney Rock’s peculiar shape leaves us with the sense that it is more than an accident of nature. But the separation of the Chimney from the mountain can easily be explained by differential erosion. Many millions of years ago, the Rocky Broad River was much higher than it is today, and it was just beginning to carve the gorge. The action of water—and subsequently weathering—eroded rock surrounding the monolith where joints had formed. Eventually Chimney Rock was created.

Though the existence of Native American artifacts in the Chimney Rock Valley is evidence of long-established human habitation, we know little of what the aborigines must have thought of this strange place. Only one legend has passed down to us, communicated by an old Cherokee chief of Qualla Town known variously as All Bones and Flying Squirrel, who told the story of a young warrior who made his way eastward through the gap in search of tobacco, or Tso-lungh, but never returned. When a magician next volunteered for the trek to the tobacco country, he found the gorge guarded by spirits called the Little People. The magician finally turned himself into a whirlwind, stripping the mountains of vegetation, scattering huge rocks, and frightening away these spirits. Ever afterward, the Cherokee had an abundant supply of tobacco, or so the legend has it.

Early in the 19th century, whites who had settled in the gorge witnessed an apparition of sorts, which suggests a basis for the Cherokee legend of the Little People. In September 1806, a newspaper article in the Raleigh Register (widely reprinted in papers across the country) recounted an Extraordinary Phenomenon witnessed about Chimney Rock. Several members of the Reaves family and a man named Robert Searcy reported seeing a very numerous crowd of beings resembling the human species ... clad with brilliant white raiment ... and collected about the top of Chimney Rock. Most likely, what they saw was a mirage-like, atmospheric phenomenon caused by temperature inversion, sometimes referred to as the fata morgana.

The first permanent white settlers probably occupied the gorge by the 1780s—as suggested by the establishment of Bill’s Creek Baptist Church, about six miles from Chimney Rock, in 1785. According to Henry E. Colton, an old fort was still visible nearby as late as the 1850s. Around 1800, a large dwelling was constructed near Round Top, just east of the gap; this was later known as the Harris Tavern. It was a post office that also served stage traffic, which began to move between Rutherfordton and Asheville following completion of the Hickory Nut Gap Turnpike about 1830.

Occasionally, early travelers recorded their impressions of the gap. Among these was an Englishman, Charles Lanman (deserving credit, by the way, for preserving the Cherokee legend recounted above), who made his way through in 1848. In his Letters from the Allegheny Mountains (1849), Lanman described the gorge as remarkably imposing and in particular noticed the high bluff to the south at the entrance to the gap, rising almost perpendicular to a height of approximately 2,500 feet, and where midway up its front stands an isolated rock, looming against the sky which is of a circular form, and resembles the principal turret of a stupendous castle. Here Lanman unmistakably describes Chimney Rock.

By the late 1850s, visitors were beginning to arrive in greater numbers; Henry Colton devotes an entire chapter to the gorge in his Mountain Scenery (1859), the first true travel guide to Western North Carolina. But soon came the interregnum of Civil War and Reconstruction. Union cavalry under Brig. Gen. William J. Palmer passed through the gap on their way to Rutherfordton from Asheville during Stoneman’s famous raid of April 1865. (It is interesting that in peacetime, many years later, Palmer revisited the gap, staying at the famous Esmeralda Inn.) During Reconstruction, the gorge was regarded as a radical Republican stronghold, owing in part to Republican judge George W. Logan’s ownership of the Harris Tavern, as well as to the tendency of the mountaineers in general to sympathize with the cause.

Brief notoriety came to the section during the spring of 1874, when a series of earthquakes occurred, centered on Bald Mountain (now known as Rumbling Bald). Locals thought the coincidence of the quakes with a religious revival (or