Hendersonville and the Western North Carolina summer arc

In one of the densely mounted photograph pages of the first album there is a small sepia snapshot, no larger than a calling card, captioned in the compiler’s pencil: “Uncle Theodore & Aunt Louisa playing croquet.” The setting is the lawn at Brookland, the Barker summer home near Hendersonville, North Carolina. The man with the long white beard is Maj. Theodore Gaillard Barker (1832-1917); the woman is his wife Louisa Preston King. The photograph cannot be precisely dated, but it sits among five other Brookland views — the driveway, the storeroom, the springhouse, the vegetable garden, the house itself — that together establish the place as a fully working summer establishment by the late nineteenth century. Brookland is the earliest anchor of the longest unbroken geographic thread in the archive: a family presence in the Western North Carolina mountains that runs, without an obvious gap, from the 1880s to the present day.

The Barker summer at Brookland

Hendersonville and the neighbouring village of Flat Rock had been Lowcountry-gentry summer destinations since the antebellum decades, when Charleston and Beaufort planters built cottages along the mountain ridge to escape the malarial coast. By the time the Confederacy collapsed and Lowcountry rice agriculture went with it, the seasonal migration northward had hardened into something more permanent. Brookland is one example of that pattern. The compiler Amy FitzSimons identified it in two captions on Book 1, p133 as “S.G.B’s summer home / near Hendersonville — N.C.” — meaning Samuel Gaillard Barker, Theodore’s father — and on Book 1, p168 simply as “The home at ‘Brookland.’” The 1917 obituary pasted on Book 1, p133, drawn from a Charleston paper, places his death there: “In the death of Major Theodore G. Barker at his summer residence at Flat Rock yesterday Charleston loses one of the last of the group of men to whom this community looked for leadership in the conflict of the '60’s and in the trying aftermath which followed.”

The obituary is also the longest single account in the album of T. G. Barker’s wartime and Reconstruction-era career. He helped organize the Hampton Legion at the outbreak of the war, served as its adjutant, and went with Wade Hampton when Hampton was transferred to the cavalry, eventually becoming his chief of staff when Hampton commanded all the cavalry of Northern Virginia. He was wounded at Burgess Mill at the head of the Fifth South Carolina Cavalry. After the surrender he resumed his law practice in Charleston with Judge Charles H. Simonton; in 1869 he founded the Carolina Rifle Club; and in 1876, at the convention that nominated Hampton for governor, he stood up and nominated himself for Congress from an overwhelmingly Republican district that no other Democrat would touch — the “forlorn hope” candidacy he later withdrew in favour of M. P. O’Connor.

The Brookland letters of 1900 and 1904, four-page bifoliums folded with the address on the outside, capture the same man at summer ease, writing to his niece Ellen Barker in Asheville. In May 1900 — Book 1, p181 and Book 1, p182 — he half-comically insisted she abandon any thought of summer tutoring work: “as between your remaining in Asheville to work — perhaps to torture some poor little idiot with private lessons — and taking a rest with us at Brookland, stupid as the latter may be, I insist upon it. Now will you be good?” In June 1904 — Book 1, p179 and Book 1, p180 — he was again urging Ellen and her mother to come over in July, after Aunt Louisa had finished her customary fortnight at Argyle (Louisa’s family seat in Flat Rock).

A typescript memorandum on Mulberry Castle, dated April 5, 1959, on Book 1, p219, records that its source was “Recollections of Gaillard Stoney FitzSimons, son of the above mentioned Doctor Christopher FitzSimons, June 7th 1949, near Hendersonville N C” — the compiler’s father, in the last full summer of his life, dictating Cooper River and Barker plantation history within a few miles of the Barker summer house. The mountains continued to function as the family’s archive and its conversation chamber.

Black Mountain in the twenties

A generation later, the Walkers were repeating the pattern in a younger and more middle-class register. James Pickens “Puck” Walker, the compiler’s husband, was an Atlantic Coast Line Railroad superintendent stationed first in Jacksonville (1923-1926) and then in Savannah. On Book 2, p116, Amy Walker’s loose-leaf memoir entry records that “while we lived in Jax. we began going to Black Mt. — to Mrs. Broadfoot’s the same year. Pickens went to Camp Carolina in Brevard. He went as a camper for 2 years, and then was a counselor several years.” Their middle daughter Mary Ann was tried at the girls’ camp Rockmont, also at Brevard.

Black Mountain, a stop on the Western North Carolina Railroad east of Asheville, had grown into a YMCA and Methodist conference town in the late nineteenth century and by the 1920s was a recognized summer retreat for Southern families with the means to send children north for the season. Camp Carolina at Brevard, founded in 1924 and still operating, was a flagship Southern boys’ camp; Pickens Jr. was among its earliest campers. The Black Mountain pages Book 2, p117 and Book 2, p118 are mounted with sepia snapshots of children in white dresses, on docks, in costume, in numbered group portraits keyed in pencil to Walker, Reid, Parker, Julian, Claypool, Broadfoot — the cohort that returned each summer to Mrs. Broadfoot’s boarding house through the late twenties.

Asheville and the mid-century mountain residence

The Barkers had also put down a year-round root in Asheville. On Book 1, p168, pasted beneath the Brookland photographs, is the Asheville Citizen obituary of Friday, November 29, 1957, for “Miss Ellen Barker, retired school teacher, artist and authority on nature lore in Western North Carolina.” Ellen was T. G. Barker’s niece — daughter of his brother Capt. Thomas M. Barker — and the obituary records that her father had brought his family from a Charleston plantation in 1885 to the Lucas family home at 47 Starnes Avenue. She taught at the Montford School (one of the surviving photographs from her estate on Book 1, p183 is the 1894 faculty group portrait, since given to Pack Memorial Public Library) and lived at the Starnes Avenue house most of her life. She was buried in the Lucas plot at Riverside Cemetery. Amy Walker’s pencilled note below the obituary names her “the last of the Barker name of our branch of the family.”

By 1957 Amy Walker herself was a Hendersonville resident. The August 14, 1957 envelope on Book 2, p208, postmarked Portsmouth, Virginia and stamped with the Jamestown 350th Anniversary slogan cancellation, is addressed to “Mrs. James Pickens Walker / Route 2, Box 390 / Hendersonville, N. C.” The same rural route reappears on Book 1, p4 in a 1959 envelope from Hollywood, Florida, annotated “Fitz Simons” in the corner. The address fixes Amy at a small farm in the Mills River area west of town through the late fifties.

1953 and after

A child’s pencil letter on violet-bordered stationery, on Book 2, p209, arrived from a grandchild not long after a visit: “The night before I got home there was a big fire. The Famous burned down and so did the Monroe Hotel.” The Monroe Hotel fire of March 28, 1953 destroyed several adjacent businesses on Hendersonville’s Main Street and remains the city’s most-remembered twentieth-century disaster. The letter continues on Book 2, p210, signed “Dee jr.,” with the plan to go on to Nags Head the next day. The Walker grandchildren were now using Hendersonville as the reference point of their own travel narratives, exactly as Major Barker had used Brookland fifty years earlier.

From the 1880s croquet match at Brookland to the 1953 Main Street fire is a span of roughly seven decades; the rural-route address at Mills River carried the family into the early sixties; cousins and descendants remain in the area today. Across four generations the Western North Carolina mountains have been the one geography this family kept circling back to — the place to which the obituaries, the children’s letters, the four-page bifolium summer invitations, and the typescript memoranda were all addressed, dictated, or returned.