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...

Mills Higgins Flack, a leader of the Farmers' Alliance and Rutherford County's first Populist in the state House, was murdered on August 28, 1900, by Avery Mills, an African American. This work documents the murder and lynching of Avery Mills.

This is the story of Collett Leventhorpe (1815-1889), an Englishman and former captain in the 14th Regiment of Foot. Leventhorpe came to North Carolina about 1843, settled there, and later served the Confederacy as a colonel in the 34th and 11th N.C. and brigadier general commanding the Home Guard in eastern North Carolina. Though he trained as a physician at the College of Charleston in the late 1840s, he never practiced and was a restless man, endlessly in search of fortune--before the war in the gold fields of North Carolina and Georgia, and after it in the pursuit of lost estates, art...