History: The Last Resort

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The Last Resort

In that other time, before battery-run gadgets ruled the world, children ran around outside in the mountain cool, racing against the gathering night and the bedtime call. Rockers creaked and laughter rang on an old inn’s porch, where grown-ups were no more willing to call it a night than were their kids. Little brown bats swooped against the backdrop of dark hills and eternal sky. Stars brightened.

Another day down at Caesar’s Head.
This was the playground, the welcome respite, the meeting place for sojourners from Greenville and parts far beyond. For the truly blessed, in such a time, “vacation” might begin in the spring and last till summer faded. Wives brought children and left the working men in town to come on weekends.

Such was the pattern established by Colonel Benjamin Hagood, Pickens County planter and businessman who bought more than 2,000 acres of precipitous former Cherokee hunting grounds in 1846. At the high point of this tract was a rock dome with craggy outcroppings, in which some found a reminder of the bald pate of Julius Caesar. (Others claim the knob was named for a hunting dog.)

Upon a scant, flat place, Hagood first built a modest lodge for the summer comfort of his young wife, Adaline Ambler, and for their children and a growing throng of visitors. In the spring, up from the Twelve Mile River Valley of Pickens, came the Hagood family carriage, wagons of provisions, sheep and pigs and chickens, a family milk cow, and an entourage of servants.

The cooler pleasures of the mountaintop were no easily attained escape. The route was by Solomon Jones Road, which by legend started as a pig track up the Middle Saluda and was, even as a toll road, a far cry from a four-lane when the Hagoods began their annual migration. In a diary entry of the early 1900s, Mary Hagood Alexander Drennen wrote, “In a horse and carriage it took us all day to get there from Pickens. The road was terrible and very steep. Sometimes we would have to get out and walk before the horses could make the grade, and there were several places where the carriage had to go over long stretches of rock with quite dangerous drop-off on one side.”

Despite the looming peril of the roadway and general unpleasantness of the journey, few were deterred. So busy, in fact, was the awful road, and so full was the kitchen at the family cabin—its floors scattered with quilt pallets almost nightly—that in the early 1860s, despite the Civil Unpleasantness raging across the land below, Benjamin Hagood built his commodious white-frame inn, Caesar’s Head Hotel.

A Great Escape
How close the perils of the Civil War came to the Hagood compound has been clearly marked by historians, who recorded that Caesar’s Head and neighboring Potts Cove, Saluda Gap, Howard’s Gap, and the Solomon Jones Turnpike formed a principal musterground for Confederate deserters. Slave-holding was rare in this territory, and sympathy for the Confederate “cause” was hardly universal. So large and aggressively up-front were the legions refusing conscription or continued service that the military chose instead to look the other way.

Known as a genial and thoughtful host, Colonel Hagood might board a hundred or more tourists a night who would dine sumptuously on roasts of mutton and platters of fried chicken and native trout, then revel in the beauty of mist-draped views, and finally rest in comfort until morning. Yet as a hotelier, the good colonel did not have long to enjoy his domain. He died in 1865. After some family shuffling of their inheritance, Hagood’s daughter, Eliza, and her husband, Dr. Francis Miles, took over the inn, running it for much of the remainder of the nineteenth century. Upon their passing, the property went to Furman University and was later sold to the Marchant family of Greenville.

Still, travelers continued to make the trip. Can anyone imagine a more idyllic summer “exile” for a small boy than that enjoyed, even now in memory, by Seabrook Marchant? “Growing up, being there in the summers, when the hotel was there, eating in that dining room, interacting with all the people … Oh, man! Otis McJunkin cooked,” Marchant recalls. “He used to make apple pies. He ordered ice cream from Biltmore Farms, not far up the road. I always had plenty of ice cream!”

Marchant, now a Greenville real estate broker, was just one in a league of children whose families, prevailingly “old Greenville,” maintained summer homes at Caesar’s Head. “There were lots of kids,” he says, mostly cousins and other extended family. Many of these families have continued their summertime Caesar’s Head tradition, and, in turn, sustained the stories of generations past on the mountaintop.

In the 1920s, Hagood descendants bought lots (joining other stalwarts in a community about the size of a pocket handkerchief) that sloped beside the summit. They built their houses rimming the precipice—front porches seeming to drift on the fog of the awesome dismal below—and left enough of the “interior” for a club and swimming pool.
Many of these families have held fast to these Greenville getaways through several generations. Popular Greenville bookseller Duff Bruce is descended from the Hagoods, and he is married to Margaret Gower (whose Caesar’s Head pedigree includes both her parents of the Gower and Greer families). Though Bruce recalls some teens rolled their eyes and sourly mourned the loss of bright lights and picture shows upon departing city life for mountain residency each summer, his own childhood on the Head was paradise.

“I once asked my granddaddy, Hagood Bruce, what he first remembered about coming up here,” Duff says. “He was born in 1892 and not long after, they came up in a wagon for the summer. They were coming up the Solomon Jones Road, and he fell off the buckboard and landed on his head. That was his excuse, for the rest of his life. ‘Well, you know, when I was a little baby I fell on my head.’”

Indeed, Solomon Jones Road was the source of more than one story coming out of Caesar’s Head. So it is unsurprising that the construction of the thoroughfare itself played a most prominent role in the evolution of the community as a resort spot. Built to connect Transylvania County with communities along the Middle Saluda River, the road was the handiwork of a local farmer, reportedly illiterate though, widely believed, full of mountain wisdoms. The story goes that Solomon Jones would heist his sow named Sue by her tail in one hand and his axe in the other. He then would hike a ways up the mountain, put Sue down, and follow her home, chopping a path as he went. The next day, a little farther up the mountain and same thing. In time, Sue made a pig’s bee-line for home—and the trough—all the way from the North Carolina line.

Though steep and thickety, the road opened as a highway in 1931, all paved and banked nicely and crooked as a serpent. Creeping modernity. People could now drive their Packards and Fords and Cadillacs to the luxuries of Caesar’s Head with some ease, although many thanked heaven for a rocked-in spring a few miles south of the summit, where boiled-over radiators could be refreshed.

Times Remembered
And then there is the story of how Tom Marchant, Jr. came to find the spot for his family’s summer Caesar’s Head home more than half a century ago—while his brother, Pete Marchant, was clearing land. Tom Marchant IV, a Greenville Realtor and Caesar’s Head descendent, recounts the story as follows: As Pete was pushing trees over a ledge with a bulldozer, he came a bit too close, the tractor “got loose” and tumbled over a cliff (Pete jumped off) before crashing to a halt on a clearing below. That spot, newly discovered as it were, became the site for the family’s home in 1950— and the canvas on which decades of Tom’s Caesar’s Head memories would be painted.
It is lore such as this that has been handed down to modern day, but perhaps the most enduring memory to emerge from Caesar’s Head does not end so happily. The year was 1954, and Bruce was about to enter kindergarten. “I was there the night the hotel burned. I was sleeping in the room with my granddaddy, at my grandparents’ house. My grandmother snored pretty badly. They each had a room, and there was a closet in the middle with a door in it that you could go from one room to the other. It was my job to bang on the wall when my grandmother snored, so she would move, turn over, and get quiet.

“That night I woke up and Granddaddy was gone. When I saw Thelma (the maid) sitting there with me I knew something was wrong. She showed me, out the window of my grandparents’ house, the hotel was on fire.”
There was nothing anyone could do.

Caesar’s Head grew quieter from that evening on. No one built the hotel back, and to this day there are still no hotel rooms in Caesar’s Head. In the hotel’s place there is the state park and its ranger station, picnic shelter, and restrooms. The Caesar’s Head headquarters of the 11,400-acre Mountain Bridge Wilderness Area have been there since 1979. Angling across the highway is Caesar’s Head’s quiet and sedate “other half,” Cliff Ridge, a gated community begun by Tom Marchant many years ago, and then sold to developer Frank Coggins.

Up the road, near the head of the Raven Cliff Falls trail, Georgia native Jimmy Vaughan has built Foxfire Mountain Cabins, a handful of modern log cabins for overnight guests. In the winter, Vaughan and his wife live in Key West, but they bought a mountain and built what they intended to be their retirement home, right at the top. Nearby is an old waterwheel they were told once supplied electricity to some of the early houses.

The Vaughans’ background is in hospitality, and when they moved to the mountain, Vaughan says, “The director of state parks talked to me and said, ‘We’ve got you surrounded! Now how about providing lodging for people who want a place to stay?’”

Six cabins have been built, and there’s room for nine more. Inquiries, Vaughan says, are brisk, with many from as far as South America and Europe. Otherwise, growth is not swift on Caesar’s Head. Part of the reason, says Seabrook Marchant, is that water is scarce, particularly during times of drought. And, he adds, “There’s just not a lot of room.”

The quiet doesn’t seem to depress him. And it bothers Duff Bruce and the cousins not at all. “We treasure it as our family’s sacred place,” Bruce says. “When I walk out on that vista, it’s like the spirits of the old folks come wafting on the breeze.”