Echoes of Eden in Western North Carolina
$46.00
In the 1850s, Charleston’s wealthiest rice planters fled their sweltering fields for the cool mountains of western North Carolina. The Johnstone, Rutledge, Hume, Gadsden, Ewbank, and Hanckel families—descendants of Revolutionary War heroes, Supreme Court justices, governors, and signers of the Declaration of Independence—brought more than 150 enslaved men, women, and children to Dunn’s Rock, building a full-time, secluded mountain
enclave.
Fleeing yellow fever, a collapsing rice economy, and fear of slave rebellion, they erected the institutions of privilege in their mountain Eden. Little more than a decade later, the community was gone—its story buried for 170 years. Echoes of Eden offers the first full account of this compelling and unknown chapter of Southern history.
