Newspapers / The Echo (Pisgah Forest, … / Jan. 1, 1949, edition 1 / Page 11
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homesteads—-one hundred acres for each settler who could attest that he owned twenty-five dol lars worth of household goods. Two settlers gave land, along their mutual boundary line, for a county seat. Main Street was laid out and a crosspatch of town lots was drawn in. Each of them contributed one lot for public use and two town lots for the four prospective churches. The old store soon had several rivals springing up in the neighborhood of the courthouse square; but before the false fronts were well in place, war severed trade with the eastern seaboard and the mushroom activities of the new county seat withered overnight. Except for the draining off of her best youth, the hinterland of Transylvania suffered compara tively little in the course of the Civil War, but in the turmoil that followed Lee’s surrender the struggling village of Brevard and the farmers of the lower valley were beset by bmhwhackers, operating from up-creek strongholds. The store was raided and a bushwhacker set fire to the pine ceiling of the storekeeper’s parlor. Under the great white oak, which stood until the Probarte paving was laid down, a committee of townsmen paid these pioneer gangsters three hundred dollars in gold for a three-year truce. The occupants had taken refuge in Henderson ville, but about 1870 the store and its cluster of shabby rooms were converted into a dwelling for the family. In another decade it was a rambling clapboard house with long double porches fac ing West. On the East was a kitchen wing which is now part of a cottage on Raikoad Street. It was the Red House now, and here a widow and her five daughters operated a boarding house for tourists from the low country. The court stopped here—Judges Shuford, Merrimon, and Gudger— and better stfll, ex-Governor Vance, who on one occasion was carrying in his pocket a red-legged grasshopper to illustrate his current speech on po litical renegades. In the front parlor, whose walls still preserve the outline of the original store, the girls, some of their neighbors, and the schoolmaster from David son River held literary soirees and put on a series of Shakesperian plays. Tlie eldest daugh ter, known as Miss Dee to three generations in Brevard, was the horsewoman of the family; from a twig which she used as a switch, the Red House willow was rooted about seventy years ago. When the younger daughters finish^ college the boardinghouse was closed. Then the old house was deserted by the dwindling family and a mis sion school, fore-runner of Brevard College, was opened. In 1913 the house was again rebuilt. Now it is completing its economic cycle as a two- family house, one of the present tenants is Ken neth McDaris of the Inspection Department. (Continued on page 15) The Red House as it is today. 9
The Echo (Pisgah Forest, N.C.)
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Jan. 1, 1949, edition 1
11
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