A famous resort town was founded purely by luck.
A couple of town builders out in Kansas dreamed it up, but fate picked the site. The year was 1875, and this was nothing more than a lofty plateau, lonely and isolated, a wilderness of rhododendron, laurel and fir, home only to the owl, the squirrel, the bear and the wild cat.
Out in Kansas, a January wind whistled through the newborn town of Hutchinson, rattling the windows and doors of a house where to men bent over a map spread out on a table.
The two men were Samuel T. Kelsey and Charles Hutchinson. As they studied the chart – a map of the United States – Kelsey took a pencil and drew a heavy black line from north to south across its face. The line ran from Chicago to Savannah, and then he drew another, starting at New Orleans and moving northeast to Baltimore.
“We will build our town there”, Kelsey said, pointing to the spot where the lines intersected. “That’s where it will be”. As well as the two men could make out, the lines converged at a point where the states of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia came together, but wholly in North Carolina.
With their eyes on the main chance. Kelsey and Hutchinson figured the point of intersection would become the exact center of population between the great population centers of the east.
“It will be like the hub of a wheel,” Kelsey said. “We build a town there and people eventually will come through it to reach every point in that part of North Carolina, in northwestern South Carolina, and points in Georgia.”
They put away their map, and then started making their plans, for they were in a hurry.
Leaving homes and families behind, they set out for Western North Carolina to find the site fate had picked for their town. They arrived in Atlanta late in January. From there they headed northeast by mule-back into the rugged hill country. After wandering around through the region for days they finally climbed out of the Georgia hills and came to an elevated mountain plateau in North Carolina.
By the calendar it was February, 1875. They were deep in great wilderness. But they decided that this was the spot where their town should be built.
They did some scouting around and discovered a trail. They followed it off the plateau and down into a cover where they found their first sign of life. They came to a house and learned they were in Horse Cove and that a sizable settlement called Cashiers was nearby.
The two men from Kansas proceeded to find out who owned the land they wanted for their town site. They were told it belonged to a man named Dobson. They found a made a deal for 800 acres on the west plateau of Satulah Mountain.
About this time they ran into Charles N. Jenks, a noted explorer and miner, who happened to be in the area on a hunting and fishing expedition.
Jenks had a pocket compass. So they persuaded him to help them lay out the town. Once the survey was made, they cut a street through the center of the town to be, running east to west.
Hutchinson was given the choice of a 42 acre tract on either side of Main Street. He picked the south side. Kelsey took the north side. Both knew a trick or so about speculation and promotion. First they erected their own homes. They used massive, hand squared pine logs. They placed them upright, taking a cue from the western stockades. They were weather-boarded on the inside and clapboarded on the outside. With their homes up, they could boast that they had a town started.
It was then that they began to send circulars and advertisements to the ague-shaken folks of Kansas and adjacent states, as well as bombarding the New England states. They called their town Highlands. The response was enough to make Kelsey and Hutchinson realize they hadn’t been wrong in the gamble.
Within two years more than a dozen families had moved in and built homes. Among the first settlers was T. Baxter White. He came down from Massachusetts. He was Highland’s first postmaster. Judson M. Cobb came with his family from Wisconsin and brought the first Jersey cattle to Highlands.
All these early settlers made the journey to Highlands over the Walhalla road, then the only exit from Highlands. It ran through Horse Cove and Franklin, a full day’s journey. So Kelsey and Hutchinson began a campaign for roads, and they got the folks to chip in and build them themselves.
Meanwhile, Kelsey and Hutchinson realized they had to have a school and a church if the town was to prosper and grown. So they build a schoolhouse in 1878. And while it was under construction, a log cabin known as the “Law House” was used for church, Sunday school, magistrate’s court and school.
A few years after the town was built, Hutchinson moved his family back to Kansas and the town he had built that bore his name. But Kelsey stayed around for quite a number of years and went on to build another town in Western North Carolina – one called Linville.