Echoes of Eden in Western North Carolina

In the 1850s, Charleston's most powerful families abandoned their sweltering rice fields for an Eden in the mountains of western North Carolina—and brought with them more than 150 enslaved men, women, and children to build it.

They bore some of the most distinguished names in American history—Johnstone, Rutledge, Hume, Gadsden, Hanckel, Ewbank—descendants of signers of the Declaration of Independence, Revolutionary War heroes, Supreme Court justices, and governors. But by the 1850s, the world these families had built on the South Carolina coast was fracturing. Yellow fever was killing their children. The rice economy was in slow collapse. The specter of slave rebellion haunted their plantations.

They fled—not to another city or another coast, but to the cool, mist-shrouded mountains above the French Broad River Valley in Dunn's Rock, North Carolina. There, they constructed a full-time, self-contained enclave: a church, a community, a miniature civilization transplanted whole from the Lowcountry. They called it their Eden.

It would not last. Little more than a decade after its founding, the Civil War tore the settlement apart. By the end of 1864, the community had vanished—its story buried for 170 years.

Echoes of Eden follows the complete arc of the Johnstone Settlement: its founding, its community life, its destruction—and what became of everyone left in its wake. The settler families scattered across a world they no longer recognized. Some took refuge in the Caribbean, seeking comfort in former British slave colonies. Others fled north to escape the ravaged Carolinas. A few abandoned their native land entirely, resettling in Mexico rather than submit to a remade South. The formerly enslaved people of Dunn's Rock were now free—but freedom without land, skills, or resources had narrow boundaries. Many became sharecroppers on land still owned by their former enslavers. Others scratched out a subsistence living on small plots in the western North Carolina hills, not far from the community that had been built on their backs.

Drawing on unpublished diaries, slave contracts and schedules, land and tax records, Civil War military archives, and the private papers of descendant families, this narrative history brings to life a community of remarkable complexity—its ambitions, its faith, its contradictions, and its end. It refuses to look away from the more than 150 enslaved people whose labor made the settlement possible, and whose names history nearly erased.

Echoes of Eden offers the first full account of this compelling and unknown chapter of Southern history.