Rob Neufeld

Visiting Our Past

“The season at Lake Toxaway is at flood tide of social gaiety,” the Asheville Citizen reported on July 28, 1907, advertising the resort’s “Annual Regatta and Opening Ball.” “Flood” was a good word choice.

Since the Toxaway Company opened its fifth hotel at Lake Toxaway in 1903, the land of waterfalls had become a top tourist destination.

“A year ago what is now Lake Toxaway was a deep gorge in the mountains, heavily timbered and of little or no use to mankind,” the Washington Post proclaimed in 1904. “And now the Southern Railway is pushing the ‘sapphire country’ along with Asheville and the ‘land of the sky.’”

If the rush of tourists was a flood, then the railroad was the force that had broken through obstacles to the flow. But literal floods also characterized Transylvania-mania.

The flood that killed South Carolina crops after the Toxaway dam broke in August 1916 made as much history as the creation of the dam and the largest artificial lake in the Appalachian Mountains.

“Think of it!” the Aug. 2, 1903, edition of the Charlotte Daily Observer exclaimed about the achievement, “A river, a bold, rapid-flowing mountain river, had been dammed and turned out of its natural course! ... It is the opinion of those who saw it in construction that the dam will stay there forever regardless of storms or cloud-bursts.”

The newspaper acknowledged the failure of another Toxaway Company dam, but that was only proof of the progress that had been made since then.

“The fishing in Lake Sapphire is fine,” the Observer mentioned, “but the lake broke during the hard rains that washed away the South Carolina cotton mills, and millions of fish perished while others went South. The dam is being rebuilt and will be as good as the one at Lake Toxaway.”

Invested

The Toxaway story involves yet another kind of flood that is in some ways the most startling — the flood of capital.

It all began in a way familiar to local history buffs. A northern capitalist — in Toxaway’s case, J. Frances Hays of New Castle, Pennsylvania — came to the North Carolina mountains for his health around 1895.

“At that time,” his associate, Tom Galloway, wrote in a 1921 obituary, “Mr. Hays was a very sick man, in search of health.” He and his wife, Minnie “stopped at Riley Hooper’s, and in a very short while Mr. Hays’ health so improved that he became himself again, and after prospecting for gold near Fairfield a few months, was so impressed with the great possibilities of this mountain section, that he set about to improve and develop the same.”

That’s all the insight we have into Hays’ motivation. How did he end up in a place where talking about transportation would have been making an overstatement?

The Henderson & Brevard Railroad had just reached Brevard, but it wouldn’t reach further until Hays bought it and extended it to Lake Toxaway. Hays would also develop a turnpike.

The Transylvania backwoods were not unknown to the world.

George Washington Vanderbilt had just completed the Biltmore Estate, connected to Transylvania County by what is now the Pisgah National Forest. Before that, Christian Reid had sent her fictional travelers by coach into the region, searching for romance and adventure in “The Land of the Sky.”

It seems that one of the main attractions to Hays had been minerals.

The Sapphire Valley Mining Company had begun operation at Burnt Rock Mine in the Lake Toxaway area in 1892. The first business action that Hays took in his new land was joining up with Charles Stolzenback, a Pittsburgh gravel magnate, to buy Sapphire Valley’s entire mineral and land holdings.

Had they then realized that ruby dust wasn’t going to cut it? Did Hays turn on a dime in appreciation of the clime? Was Hays influenced by the fact that his best accommodations were at Riley Hooper’s place?

The most I can find out about Hooper is that he was married to Esther Whitmire, whose family was intermarried with the Galloways, who were leaders in the East Fork area near Toxaway.

At any rate, once Hays and his partners started placing their chips, they went all in. It wasn’t just one guy building a hotel and lake.

Like Joseph Silversteen, the area’s lumber king, Hays started a tanning company to make use of chestnut bark. He bought the Henderson & Brevard Railroad, changed its name to the Transylvania Railroad and made a deal with Southern Railway that gave it access to Transylvania County.

The 1899 agreement, printed in Jan Plemmons’ book, “Ticket to Toxaway,” stipulated that, in order to increase traffic on both railroads, the Toxaway Co. will construct a lake with a 15-mile shoreline (Toxaway), build a new hotel and develop the lumber interest and mineral deposits. A 1902 addendum included extending the railroad to Lake Toxaway and harvesting the additional trees, including those on other people’s land, for which it would get stumpage rights.

Golden age

For a decade, the Toxaway Company experienced a flowering worthy of a royal court. In 1906, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone and Henry Ford came down to Lake Toxaway by automobile.

What a remote, natural paradise, equipped with modern urban conveniences! There was horseback riding, hunting, boating, bowling, dancing and fishing in a lake stocked with trout, bass and the South’s first ever salmon.

In some ways, it was too much a dream. Southern Railway started building its own lines to Toxaway and taking control of the traffic. Hays resigned as manager of the Toxaway Company and went to work for the Railway as superintendent in its Asheville office.

The company that ran the hotels couldn’t pay its debts and forfeited its leases to the Toxaway Company, which, a few years later, in 1911, sold everything to E.H. Jennings at auction.

When the Toxaway dam — an engineering masterpiece of stone and clay — held in the July 1916 flood that did record damage in Asheville, people celebrated. Yet, the next month, more heavy rain caused a piece of the Toxaway foundation to break where a leak had occurred and the whole dam collapsed, shooting water and giant boulders down the Toxaway River through what is now Gorges State Park toward Lake Jocassee.

Lake Toxaway was drained of its water.

“People were carrying away fish from the completely emptied lake by the bagful,” the Asheville Citizen reported. “The bottom of the lake is but a depth of black, oozy, sticky mud, with countless half-rotten stumps of what were once forest giants protruding their ugly heads.”

There were plans to rebuild, but that didn’t happen, and in 1946, the Toxaway Inn was razed. It wasn’t until 1960 that the Toxaway property was restored by a group called Lake Toxaway Estates to create a residential development with a golf course, forests, a country club and a private lake, cupped by a new dam.

Hays died alone in a Washington, D.C. hotel, Nov. 21, 1921, about two years after his wife had died. He was buried in New Castle.

Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature and manages the WNC book and heritage website The Read on WNC. Follow him on Twitter @WNC_chronicler.