LINVILLE A Place of Beauty for 125 Years
Howard E. Covington Jr.
FOREWORD
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hen I turn my car north and head toward Linville the pressures and demands of everyday life fall away in much the same way that the summer heat fades as my route carries me up the mountain. There is little that can pry me away once I arrive. My kids say I’ve gone to camp. For each of us, Linville is a special place. Perhaps it’s just the embrace of the mountains, the pungent scent of the forest after a rain, the lush green of the fairways, or the falling water of a stream where rainbow trout turn lazily in a pool alert to the kiss of a fly on the surface above. Nothing compares to the balm of cool breezes when summer heat is baking the rest of my world in South Carolina. The simple fact, both comforting and amazing, is that Linville people have been enjoying and sharing these pleasures for a remarkable span of 125 years. I think of my own company, founded in 1901, as having a weighty heritage. It does, of course, but when they began laying brick for that first mill in Inman, the Eseeola had been serving guests for a decade, golf was being played on the Tanglewood course, fly fishermen had discovered the Linville River, and riders on horseback were following well-worn trails over the mountains. Our centennial book, Linville, A Mountain Home for 100 Years, recognized those early days and the determination of the MacRae family to create a mountain retreat beneath Grandfather’s heights. Some of the families that were attracted to Linville in that era remain part of our community today with third and even fourth generation connections intact. This volume adds to the centennial story and turns our attention especially to the heritage left to us by those whom our former chairman, Alan Dickson, always called “the stewards.” They were practical men of business, facing challenges during a time of world war in the 1940s, who set aside their own vested interests to protect and maintain a place that meant more to them than the metrics of the bottom line. Members of those families continue to provide the foundation for Linville’s governance, of which I am proud to be a part. Habits have changed over time. We’re a commuting society these days; summer-long residence is rare. A two-hour drive has replaced the extended travel once required to reach Linville. Horseback riding has faded into history, but we’ve restored the health of the Linville River and fly-fishing, a particular draw of the Eseeola more than a century ago, is more popular than ever. Thank goodness, the bypass has moved the noisy, downshifting semis to the west side of Pixie Mountain. What is remarkable is that the heart of Linville remains the same. Our Donald Ross golf course, which first opened for play in 1926, is resplendent, still dressed in the natural features that the old master used in his design nearly a century ago. The Eseeola continues as our living room, a beckoning doorway for those seeking a taste of what we enjoy. We are families that have grown up together, shared picnics at Montezuma, hikes up Grandfather, and even marriage ceremonies at All Saints and Wee Kirk. Each family has its own Linville, yet we are bound by the same love of place and spirit of togetherness that continues, strong as ever, into our 125th season.
Robert H. Chapman III, Chairman, Linville Resorts Inc. Board of Directors
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hatever hope Richard Tufts may have had for squeezing a profit out of Linville in his first year of managing the place was dampened by the end of the summer of 1944. The Eseeola had reopened and golf had been played. The summer crowd—at least those with the means and the opportunity—settled in to enjoy the cool nights and warm days. Not all the troubles of the world could be kept from the peaceful valley, however. The threat of poliomyelitis haunted Americans that summer. There had been a scare in North Carolina in the late 1930s, but the mountain communities had been spared. That was not the case in 1944. A boy at Camp Yonahnoka succumbed and his mates were quarantined. The McWane’s daughter, Bee, also fell ill. She recovered and went on to become a championship golfer, but in the summer of 1944 even a hint of infection of a disease that could quickly cripple and kill meant parents kept
their children indoors and everyone avoided public gatherings. Places like the Eseeola Lodge had a hard time filling their rooms. Neither the seasonal lease to Pinehurst, nor the passing of time, had eased the financial burdens of the MacRaes. They still needed cash to pay off accumulated debt. That August, Julian Morton notified Norman Cocke that he had given an option for sale of the resort property to an investor in New York. The family was going to take the best deal that it could find, regardless of the long-standing relationship with Linville’s summer residents. Once again, he warned that Hugh MacRae’s mountain holdings were to be the first to be sold to relieve the family’s financial bind. Morton’s news changed everything for the homeowners. Now, faced with their accustomed way of mountain life being at the mercy of a total stranger, and a New Yorker to boot, the Old South gentry mobilized
Facing page: Linville Resorts was run by Richard Tufts of Pinehurst when the Eseeola reopened in the summer of 1944. He arranged for a series of publicity photos to highlight the varied offerings of the resort – fishing, golf and horseback riding. Above: Richard Tufts found that his efforts to fill the Eseeola in the late-1940s were made more difficult by periodic scares over poliomyelitis.
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New Owners _______________________________________________________________________________________________ A meeting of all the shareholders that August also left matters unresolved. They gave the directors leave to decide the future on their own. In a letter to the directors that September, Tufts confirmed his lack of interest in renewing Pinehurst’s contract. The only year the company had made money was the one that raised the most complaints from the cottage owners. He advised the directors to form a club and have members ante up the amount needed to keep the operation running, or find a buyer and hope for the best. At least the Linville property was in better shape than when he had arrived in 1944. In late September 1950, Tufts wished the directors well, but it was easy to see he looked forward to being shed of the place. Cramer was not finished. A few weeks later, he and his wife were in Southern Pines at a table in the dining room of the Hollywood Inn. It was an old-fashioned, sixty-room resort hotel with three stories of southern comfort, broad porches, awnings over the windows, and tall holly bushes shading the lawn. They had come unannounced to look over the brothers—John and George Pottle—whose father had taken on the Hollywood and run it in tandem with another familyowned hotel for summer guests in New Hampshire. The food was good, Cramer later reported to the other directors, the service was excellent, the place was clean, and it appeared to attract “high class and rather quiet folk.” After an approving examination of the Hollywood, Cramer sought out the Pottles, introduced himself and they all sat
down to talk. Julia Cramer and her husband immediately took a liking to John’s wife, Erma, who joined in. Cramer explained the situation at Linville. He did not extend an offer, but he dangled the possibility of a one-season trial period as a carrot to something longer term, if everything worked out. Reporting to the other directors a day or two later, he indicated that the Pottles were good prospects, and that after he left the brothers he stopped in to see Richard Tufts in nearby Pinehurst. Tufts had recommended the Pottles and offered any assistance in helping them open the Eseeola for the 1951 season. When the Linville directors arrived for a called meeting in Charlotte on January 3, 1951, Norman Cocke had other applications for the job on his desk at Duke Power Company, where he was now running the company. The Cramers liked the Pottle brothers, and when Richard Tufts arrived with John Pottle in tow it was pretty clear who was going to run Linville in the summer to come. Tufts figuratively, at least, turned over the keys to the place and stepped down as president of Linville Resorts Inc. Cramer took his place. John Pottle was thirty-five years old, more New England than North Carolina, and it is not clear whether he had ever set foot in the Linville Valley. He did have a reputation as a fine golfer on his side. He was about to learn that if he was going to be at the Eseeola for more than one season, he would need to inflict surgery upon Linville that was as radical as what Cramer had endured to find relief for his burning ulcers. v
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John Pottle (above) was in the hotel business with his brother in Pinehurst when Linville Resorts hired him to manage the Eseeola Inn beginning with the summer of 1951. Pottle was thirty-five. His last season came with his retirement in 1982.
One of the loveliest spots on the golf course is the confluence of the fifteenth tee with the ninth, tenth and eleventh holes in the background. Much care and expense is devoted to maintaining the traditional Linville look of the wood railings marking the boundaries.
course developers were some of his company’s customers. Cast-iron pipe manufactured in his Birmingham foundries provided drainage for some of the best courses in the land, including Augusta National Golf Club, where McWane had been a member since 1948. Some say he was invited to join in 1933 when America’s favorite amateur golfer, Bob Jones, and Clifford Roberts opened Augusta National. They were certainly grateful; the sprinkler system laid out underground at Augusta consumed 32,000 feet of cast-iron pipe that McWane let them have at a price below cost. But he declined their offer, or so the story goes. Apparently he stayed in touch. The McWane Cast Iron Pipe Company was one of the advertisers in the program
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Start of a New Era
Rooms in the Eseeola were renovated and attention was paid to details such as fresh flowers (native species) and crisp linens in the rooms. Three years after Blackburn took charge, the Eseeola received a Mobil Four-Star rating.
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Start of a New Era _______________________________________________________________________________________ season into October—as Hound Ears had done to its profit years before—to catch the leaf-lookers drawn to higher elevations and the fall color, or to attract those interested in getting in a few last rounds of golf. Blackburn proudly posted the Eseeola’s Mobil Four-Star rating when it was awarded in 1986 just as the hotel opened for the summer. The news came not long after a gushing profile on Linville appeared in Town & Country magazine, de rigueur for the coffee tables of the Palm Beach set. The T&C writer buried himself in the resort’s nineteenthcentury founding, its blossoming in the Twenties and Thirties, the golf, and its long-standing attraction for southern blue bloods. It occasionally got the facts correct. The piece turned mostly on the MacRae family, the festivities that clustered around the annual Highland Games on Grandfather Mountain, and Grandfather Golf and Country Club, but there was sufficient mention of the Eseeola and the resort to make it worth saving. “Today, Linville still looks as it did in the days of Bobby
Jones,” T&C reported. It was a place where the Eseeola “is still the social center” and worshippers crowd the pews at All Saints on Sunday because that was where the week’s social invites were exchanged. The article’s lack of depth was evident to any who knew the place. John Blackburn told the T&C writer he probably would not be interested in Linville folks, anyhow. Social hobnobbing had never really been part of the culture. These folk worked in textile mills and banks, he said. They might have wealth, but they clocked in at the office each day. The Mobil award put a smile on Dickson’s face. The gamble that he and Cramer had taken on with a relatively untutored, untraveled, untested new John Blackburn introduced the Eseeola’s manager who did not even Thursday night seafood buffet to attract play golf had paid off. The more business to the lodge. Chef John Hofland ran the kitchen from 1986 to Eseeola was lifted above 2007 with the help of his wife, Debbie. the nuisance level, as it was regarded by some of the cottagers who were still pining to run Linville as a private club. Now, the Eseeola was an award-winning hotel with recognized excellence. Dickson couldn’t have been more pleased. The Mobil rating also convinced the man that Blackburn had been recruiting as the Eseeola’s new chef, John Hofland,
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ost of the streams flowing out of Avery County eventually reach the Gulf of Mexico. That’s not the case with the rivulets coming down the west side of Grandfather Mountain that create Big Grassy Creek and Lower Grassy Creek to form the headwaters of the Linville River. This tributary of the Catawba River changes names twice in South Carolina before it empties into the Atlantic midway between Charleston and Myrtle Beach. At the beginning of the twentieth century, articles in national magazines touting the fabulous fly-fishing on the Linville River helped keep the Eseeola Inn in business. Writers rhapsodized about the trout pulled from sections of the river reaching from the upper portions of Big Grassy Creek to the point, miles downstream, where the Linville River escaped from the Blue Ridge by plunging ninety feet into Linville gorge. It was, as a writer called it in 1911, “The
Stream That Always Laughs.” That was before the river fell on hard times in the second half of the twentieth century. The river’s flow was reduced as real estate and commercial developments disturbed the landscape and builders tapped the stream to serve second homes and freshen the golf courses. Pollution levels rose to the point that even boiling the water wasn’t sufficient to make it safe to drink. Fishermen still tried their luck, but stocked supplies of brown and rainbow trout would not reproduce. Silt settled in pools that once were deep enough for a summer’s swim. The flood that followed Hurricane Hugo’s visit to the Blue Ridge escarpment in 1989 changed everything. The rushing waters flushed the river, carried away the silt, and by the spring of 1990 the Linville River was showing signs of rebirth. That inspired some Linville sportsmen who began working
Facing page: Alan Burchell runs the Linville Resorts outdoor program, which has thrived on a revival of the health of the Linville River. Above: Lee Cochran shows off her catch of the day.
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to attract people of like minds who would enjoy fellowship, friendship and just being together.” She subscribes to Dickson’s future for Linville, as does Robert H. Chapman III of Spartanburg, another South Carolinian singled out by Dickson for board membership who then succeeded him as chairman in 2010. Chapman comes from a family of upcountry South Carolina Chapmans, most of whom have Linville ties. (His uncle, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Robert F. Chapman, once owned “Sam the Wonder Dog” who dove for golf balls in Grandmother Creek, usually emerging with one, two, or even three in his mouth.) Chairman Chapman is a fourth-generation textile executive who turned his family’s Inman Mills into a world competitor using technology, creativity, and the grit to upend a dying business in an overhaul that began in the late 1990s. Chapman has profound respect for Linville history, and those who went before him. “Alan, Scotty, and Russell established a road map and we are following it,” says Chapman. “This place is perfect. The golf course is so good now. Then take the Alan Dickson Center. We had to find a place for kids and the teens. Now with that pool and the teen center, it has taken this place to a whole new level.” The Dickson Center is a collection of bark-covered buildings that house a pavilion, spa, exercise center, and teen gathering space, all on the flanks of a swimming pool and decks. Like most of the improvements at Linville, it had been on the to-do list for years. The swimming pool and pavilion that it replaced was built in the 1950s, when Americans considered motels a new thing. Work on the center began shortly after Dickson’s death in
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2012. His was an unexpected loss and one deeply felt, even by those who, usually out of earshot, called him “the ayatollah” and chafed at his strong direction. Had he been alive to see the center’s completion in 2013, Dickson would have ground to dust those board members who put his name over the front door. His portrait also hangs over the fireplace in the pavilion. Linville wasn’t about singling out individuals, Dickson would have rumbled; it moved forward as family. It is the resort’s only building that carries a family name. In the years ahead, Linville will continue to evolve, but in measured steps as it has in the past. “I don’t think you can beat this place the way it is today,” said Chapman in 2015. “We have updated everything.” The Dickson Center, the outdoor program, the improvements on the golf course and at the tennis complex, complete a broad menu of offerings for members. “I don’t think we want to get a whole lot bigger,” he said. “Linville is its own quaint little community. That is why we have all of this property to protect us.” Yet, he admits, “John and I may have tunnel vision. We may not know enough.” So, an outside land planner was engaged in 2015 to review Linville’s options and bring ideas to the board for uses of the property that sustain the traditions of Linville. Before he left the board, Dickson saw to it that the qualities that had made Linville survive and thrive under the personal attention of those invested in the place would remain. The members approved a further adjustment of the bylaws to see that Linville’s future remained in the hands that know it best. The changes should dissuade the interests of any outside speculator grabbing up distant remnants of loose stock. The resort’s future is settled in the hands of those who gather for
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Preservation ______________________________________________________________________________________________ the annual meeting of shareholders, usually held the third Saturday in August at the Pavilion. Quipped Bick Cardwell, “If Linville ever were for sale, it would be for a dime on the dollar because all hell would have broken loose.” There was little of anything to distinguish the Linville valley in 1888 from other reaches of cutover forestland that Donald MacRae had surveyed in his years. It was raw land studded with stumps, which gave rise to one of its early names,
Stumptown. MacRae saw something more, which passed down to his sons, and to their families and on to those stewards who picked up the place and dusted it off in 1944. He might be warmed by the sight of what the valley had produced 125 years after he dreamed of “making of Linville a place of beauty and attractiveness, a popular resort for health and pleasure for the best class of cultured people possessed of means to aid us in adorning and beautifying the valley.” v