Highlands

North Carolina

The sound of water falling in a straight line for 120 feet is a constant, low-frequency roar that defines a space before you see it. This is the reality of Cullasaja Falls, the largest waterfall on the river that carved the gorge separating Highlands from the rest of the world. The town was founded in 1875, not by settlers seeking farmland, but by two land speculators, Samuel Truman Kelsey and Clinton Carter Hutchinson, who stretched a string across a map of the Blue Ridge. They connected the railroad towns of Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Murphy, North Carolina, and proclaimed the midpoint, 4,118 feet above sea level, the ideal location for a new health resort and summer colony. The founding was a surveyor’s abstraction, a point on paper where two lines met, but the land itself determined everything that followed.

The terrain is a dissected plateau, the highest town east of the Mississippi River. It is a landscape of extremes: an average annual rainfall of 88 inches, among the highest in the eastern United States, and a temperate climate where summer highs rarely exceed 80 degrees. This climate is a product of elevation. The underlying geology is a complex of metamorphic rock, primarily gneiss and schist, part of the Eastern Blue Ridge geologic province. Erosion over millennia by the Cullasaja, Chattooga, and other rivers created the deep, steep gorges that make direct travel to the town even today a series of tight switchbacks. For the indigenous people who traversed this region, these highlands were not a place of permanent settlement but of passage and resource gathering. The Cherokee, whose territory encompassed these mountains, knew the area as A'talati, translated as "the place where they scratched." This name referred to a traditional deer-hunting method, where hunters would hide in a pit and use a notched stick to mimic the sound of antlers, luring bucks within range. The name is a functional record of human interaction with the specific ecology of the plateau.

The founders’ plan for a resort succeeded precisely because the land resisted all other uses. The soil was thin and acidic, the slopes too severe for extensive agriculture. What the land offered was cool air, pure water, and dramatic scenery—commodities that became valuable to lowlanders escaping the heat and disease of southern summers. The earliest buildings were rustic boarding houses and simple cottages. Access was the primary obstacle; the first "road" was little more than a widened trail. Development was slow until the arrival of the railroad in 1890, not in Highlands itself, but in nearby Dillsboro. From there, a 35-mile stagecoach journey, a full day's travel, brought visitors up the mountain. The town was incorporated in 1879, and its early economy was almost entirely seasonal, built on hospitality. The Highlands Hotel, opened in 1880, could accommodate 150 guests. The town's design reflected its purpose: lots were sold with covenants prohibiting certain industries, ensuring it remained a scenic retreat.

The land’s other resource was timber. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, vast stands of American chestnut, oak, and poplar were logged. The timber was floated down the Chattooga River or transported by narrow-gauge rail. This industry brought a more permanent, year-round population and a different social class—loggers and mill workers—alongside the summer residents. The chestnut blight of the early 1900s, which functionally eradicated the dominant tree species of the eastern forest, marked the end of this era and shifted the economic focus back towards tourism and conservation. The creation of the Nantahala National Forest in 1920 brought federal management to much of the surrounding land, protecting the watersheds and scenic vistas that were the town’s raison d'être.

The 20th century saw the tension between preservation and development play out in the landscape. The construction of Highway 64 in the 1930s, part of a federal public works project, replaced the treacherous dirt tracks with a paved, though still winding, road. It opened the area to automobile tourism and made the dramatic waterfalls—Bridal Veil Falls, Dry Falls, and Cullasaja Falls—accessible roadside attractions. Dry Falls allows pedestrians to walk a path behind its 75-foot curtain of water, a direct, immersive experience of the force that shaped the gorge. The road itself, clinging to the side of the Cullasaja Gorge, is an engineering response to an immutable geographic fact.

A different kind of response emerged in the 1960s with the founding of the Highlands Biological Station. Scientists recognized the area as a biodiversity hotspot, a consequence of the dramatic elevation gradient and high rainfall. The station became a center for the study of Southern Appalachian ecology, herpetology, and botany. The nearby Highlands Plateau Greenway, a network of trails, was later established to protect sensitive habitats like the 30-acre Kelsey Trail Bog, a rare montane wetland community. This scientific and conservationist ethos exists alongside the town’s identity as a cultural enclave. The Highlands Playhouse, founded in 1939, and numerous art galleries cater to the seasonal population, a tradition stretching back to the founders’ original vision.

Modern Highlands is defined by a stark seasonal rhythm and a significant wealth disparity, both direct results of its geographic appeal. The permanent population is approximately 1,000, but from May to October, the number of residents and visitors swells into the tens of thousands. The service economy—restaurants, retail, landscaping—relies on workers who often commute from counties in Georgia and South Carolina, descending the same mountain roads that visitors ascend. Real estate values are among the highest in North Carolina, driven by second-home construction. The town government has enacted strict zoning laws and architectural standards to preserve its "mountain village" character, a continual negotiation between growth and the constraints of a very limited, steep, and ecologically fragile land base.

The land continues to propose, and humans continue to respond. The high rainfall that creates the lush temperate rainforest environment also necessitates complex stormwater management systems to prevent erosion and protect water quality in the headwaters of the Cullasaja. The cool climate that attracts summer visitors also brings a winter freeze-thaw cycle that challenges road maintenance on the winding grades. The story of Highlands is not one of dominating a landscape, but of adapting to one that permits only specific, often precarious, uses. It is a community built on an abstraction—a midpoint on a string—that was then forced to contend with the physical reality of a wet, high, and deeply carved plateau. That reality is still best understood not from the town’s quaint main street, but from the path behind Dry Falls, standing in the perpetual spray, looking out through a wall of water at the ancient, unyielding rock.