Swiss chalets in North Carolina

During his years as a powerful Democratic Party stalwart, Heriot Clarkson also established his summer resort colony in the North Carolina mountains. He found the perfect spot in the summer of 1909 as he rode a mule to an isolated mountaintop offering sweeping panoramic views and an ample supply of fresh springwater. Rushing home to Charlotte, he rounded up nine other men -- drawn from among his associates in the city's professional, business, and real estate community -- to invest in his venture. Within two months, the investors had signed a contract to buy as much of the Grassy Mountain and Chestnut Ridge property as they could from the local families who owned it. By early fall, the investors had incorporated the Switzerland Company to run the development, which soon came to comprise more than eleven hundred acres straddling Mitchell and McDowell Counties.

Planning for Little Switzerland, as the investors named the resort, began in earnest in early 1910. One hundred acres of the land (purchased for about $11 per acre) would initially be offered in one-acre parcels for $150 (soon $300) for home sites. To ready the lots for cottages, the company installed a water and sewer system (planned to empty into a stream six hundred feet down the mountain) and set to work improving railroad and wagon access. Clarkson used his influence to have a Carolina, Clinchfield, and Ohio Railroad station moved to within two miles of the resort, and by 1910, a company-financed toll road connected the station to Little Switzerland. That summer, Clarkson's widowed sister, Ida Clarkson Jones, opened the Switzerland Inn, which quickly became the center of the new community. In the ensuing months, Jones advertised the new resort by entertaining both prospective homeowners from the Charlotte area and local residents from the surrounding mountains at a series of parties, picnics, and celebrations.

Cottage construction proceeded slowly at first, with only Clarkson and his Charlotte law partner building homes by 1911. But before long, about twenty people -- like the initial investors, mostly Charlotte-area attorneys and busienssmen -- had bought lots, and four of them immediately built summer homes. Road development continued apace, and Clarkson built a general store and post office in 1911. In 1912 he had a telephone line installed, virtually the only modern convenience available at the resort until electricity arrived in the 1930s. With ten more cottages built between 1913 and 1916, the colony began to take shape. ...

(From "Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History" by Anne Mitchell Whisnant. Copyright 2006 by The University of North Carolina Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. For more information visit www.uncpress.unc.edu.)

Researcher Brooke Cain searches journals and other sources for talk about the South. She can be reached at (919) 829-4579 or bcain@newsobserver.com.