Rob Neufeld

Visiting Our Past

It isn’t true that James Madison “Big Jim” Morgan left his Cherryfield home near Rosman when he was 22 and returned home from the California Gold Rush with $10,000 stuffed in his belt.

That’s what Earle Hitch wrote in a 1959 “Transylvania Times” article, having heard it from the son of the man who’d become the seventh owner of Morgan’s mountainside mill.

“Big Jim” — whose nickname distinguished him from his nephew, “Little Jim,” and described his bulk — was becoming a legend, it seems. And, in the manner of legend-making, another journalist, Cal Carpenter, repeated the Gold Rush story, doubling up on Hitch’s hunch.

There’s a more direct connection to the truth about Big Jim through his granddaughter, Ruth Morgan Stroup, who, in 1986, published the “bonafide facts,” based on interviews with her grandmother, father and uncle.

Horse wrangler

“When Jim was a young man,” Stroup related, “he went to Texas, where he and his partner, a Mr. Shoemaker, corralled wild horses, bought rough iron in Houston which they made into horse shoes and nails, and shod the horses. They then sold the horses ... to the army” during the war with Mexico.

After 10 years in Houston, Big Jim, apparently having accumulated a lot of wealth in additional ways, “made a money belt of buckskin and stuffed it with $10,300 in $10 dollar gold pieces,” Stroup recounted. Jim’s dog — named Penny — accompanied him on his return to his humble roots.

So, the money belt part of the story is confirmed!

But all that is prelude to the local story — the decision Big Jim made after amassing his fortune, which was, first of all, to come home. His father, mother and four siblings continued to reside in the Cherryfield area, his father having established himself in cattle and blacksmithing after a four-stage odyssey from England to the Blue Ridge.

Jim, now big in yet another way, bought 640 Cherryfield acres — one square mile — encompassing the watersheds of what we now call Peter Weaver and Morgan Mill creeks as they spill east into the French Broad River from Double Springs Mountain.

Jim’s goal was to build a mill for rye, wheat and corn, incorporating the best materials and parts.

He built his mill house of 12-inch chestnut, got the grinding stones for the grassy grain from a burnt out mill in Rutherford County and purchased the millstone for the corn from France, its burrstone material considered the most effective in separating flour from bran.

The dream was not to make a large profit, but to serve a community, which was not very large.

Even in the 1920s, when the train from Hendersonville to Lake Toxaway passed through, local elder Raleigh Waldrop told Peggy Hansen for her book “Transylvania Memories,” Cherryfield was as “big as it ever was. Never was a town. Just the church, a little ol’ school, the depot and J.C. Whitmire’s store.”

Whitmire, who featured a “silk” department (for bolts of cloth) and sold caskets, farm implements and hoops of cheese, also ran a mill, located one creek up from Morgan’s.

Mills and dams were numerous in Transylvania County because it was, and is, the land of waterfalls.

Falls, dams, and wheels

“The county has more waterfalls than any other in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and possibly in the United States,” Nicole Blouin and others write about Transylvania in “Waterfalls of the Blue Ridge.”

The falls are not big, but there are perhaps 500, the authors note. They result from heavy rainfall flowing from 6,000 feet at the border with Haywood County through erosion-resistant rock to 1,000 feet at the border with South Carolina.

The land ends up being not great for farming or commerce, but fantastic for small, independent communities, tourism, logging and also industries that depend upon pure and fast water.

Pioneers constructed long flumes to turn water wheels, and entrepreneurs built dams to create reservoirs.

The website, lat-long.com lists 1,632 dams in North Carolina. One-fiftieth of them are located along Route 276 from Dunns Rock to Cedar Mountain in an area that comprises one-five-thousandth of the state.

Falling water filled locals’ lives and imaginations.

“Here’s something I’ve always remembered about my uncle, Mr. Van Waldrop,” Raleigh Waldrop recollected. After church one Sunday, a group from Cherryfield went to Toxaway, and Lessie Morris, a 14-year-old girl, slipped on a slick rock and fell over the falls.

“There wasn’t but one way to get her,” Uncle Van said. “He sat down and scooted down that rock ... I think his pants was tore up when he got down there! He saved that girl’s life ... Uncle Van didn’t even think of himself. He just went after that girl.”

Raleigh also recalls water piped into a wood-stove-heated boiler at home and “dinners on the ground” at church. People staggered away from banquets laid out on blankets, carrying plates heaped with good eats, including the lost treat of corn bread made from slow-milled meal.

Every generation or so, floods made an unforgettable impression of Transylvanians. The Great Flood of 1916, which in Transylvania County occurred in mid-August, a month after the Asheville disaster, broke the dam at Toxaway and wiped out most of the mills in the region forever.

One of the surviving mills, Whitmire’s, closed after the floods of 1964. Morgan’s Mill, owned and operated by Jim and May Bishop since 1979, survived until 1998, when a heavy snowstorm destroyed it.

Jim, a Traveler’s Rest native, had returned from a career in Chicago to pursue a mill-owning dream. He produced water-power-ground corn meal from the old mill and achieved National Historic Register status for the structure. He also produced cider and molasses. A 1993 “Transylvania Times” article reports a visit from Rocky Bottom Camp of the Blind, whose nostalgic members were fed cornbread pound cake.

The only operating mill in Transylvania County today is at Rockbrook Summer Camp for Girls in Dunns Rock.

Below the Morgan Mill site, Alfred Owen runs Morgan Mill Trout Farm, benefiting from another virtue of the geography, Class B trout streams. He competes against companies that provide genetically modified trout for processing markets, yet grows 300,000 trout a year for stocked ponds.

Just behind Owen’s property, Morgan Mill’s 30-foot diameter iron water wheel, acquired from Breese Mill in Brevard after its 1916 demise, now stands upright in the woods, detached from its housing, but still holding onto the gooseneck end of its iron-pipe flume.

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.

LEARN MORE

•Transylvania County Library opens an exhibit on the flood of 1916 in August and shows David Weintraub’s documentary, “Come Hell or High Water,” Aug. 9.

•The Sherwood Forest community, off Route 276, presents talks about the natural and human history of the area, Tuesdays at 7 p.m. in the Robin Hood barn. Write info@sherwoodforestnc.com.