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Echoes of Eden in Western North Carolina
A wealthy Southern enclave. A community vanished.
A storied buried for 170 years. Until now.
Uncovering the Johnstone Settlement and the 150 enslaved people whose lives shaped the region.
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, Lucas, 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.
Little more than a decade after its founding, the settlement vanished, a victim of lawlessness brought on by the Civil War. Their story lay buried for 170 years. Until now.
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, including the enslaved people, upon whose shoulders the settlement's success had rested.
Drawing on unpublished diaries, slave contracts and schedules, land and tax records, Civil War military archives, and the private papers of descendant families, this narrative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 the personal story of a community in all its 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 shaped the region, and whose names history nearly erased.
Echoes of Eden offers the first full account of this compelling and unknown chapter of Southern history.
REVIEWS
“Echoes of Eden reads like a novel . . . A well-researched must read.”
“Echoes of Eden is a forgotten and remarkable story . . . this is “local” history at its best, giving us a close-up view of how larger historical forces reshaped the world of smaller communities.”
“ . . . A meticulously researched story set against the political and economic upheaval of the American Civil War.”
Francis Withers Johnstone founded the Dunn's Rock settlement.
