LuVerne Haydock

Partial Transcript: My name is LuVerne Haydock. My family has been in this area on most sides since about the Revolutionary War or before, and I—we’ve always lived in this area—Rutherford County, Polk County, Buncombe County, Henderson County. And I have done a lot of traveling. I worked as a traveling nurse for a while. But other than that, I’ve been pretty much living around here.

Partial Transcript: My Haydock grandparents—my grandmother worked at home, and my grandfather did several things. He was a caretaker out on Chestnut Gap Road for the farm of the Bonds. The son of that farm was—ended up being Dr. George Bond who started the family clinic and hospital in Bat Cave and who was—who called my grandfather Uncle Buford (Buford Gamaliel Haydock)—and who also went on to be a big person in diving medicine and SEALAB and all that. And then he—he also worked out at Berkeley, so he did a number of things. And on the Flack side, they were entrepreneurs of one kind and another. My grandfather—his parents owned Mountain View Inn, which was a huge—the biggest inn in the area. In 1916 they built an addition, and it had a dining room that seated 150 people. And there’s still not a place that big anymore. It burned down in the fifties. And he and his wife—well, he moved first. He went to Montana. And in 1909 he came home to visit. And he and my great-grandmother surprised everybody and got married and went back to Montana. And they were there until 1916. And he was shot in the leg, trying to break up a fight in Montana—a fact I didn’t know anything about until recently. He limped. We all knew it. But nobody thought to ask him why. And then he—he had a soda shop, and he worked at the hotel. And he did all kinds of things like that. And my grandmother, again, kept house. And then later—and they built a house in Chimney Rock. And it was pretty much self-sustaining: They had a cow. They had a garden. They had chickens. They had all kinds of fruit trees. And they made it pretty much self-sustaining for the most part. And he had bees. And they also took in guests into their house. And my sister used to think, when she was little, that everybody had a job, and my grandmother’s job was having preachers, who came into the valley, come and stay with them and put them up and to feed every preacher that walked around (laughs)—because that’s what she did! And I have her recipe book. And there are things in it like punch for a hundred. So she did a lot of big church functions. But I’m sure she did a lot of things up at the inn as well, because everybody contributed to the great-grandparents’ inn.

Partial Transcript: Everywhere. They came from up north. They came from all over the state. They came from down south. My great-grandfather, J. M. Flack, was a—owned the—he and his wife, Lavinia, owned the inn. And during—after the 1916 flood, he got a letter from Rutherfordton—so I’m guessing that’s where the judge had retired to—but from a judge that was from Guilford County and obviously knew him well. So evidently he had been coming and staying there before they moved. And there was a woman called Maud Ilsen something who was a big poet and a writer. And she came, and she wrote a book about the—and stayed there—and wrote a book about the building of the steps up to the chimney. And one of his sons owned Esmeralda Inn where they—you know, Ben Hur—part of Ben-Hur was written there. And the movie stars came and stayed there, because at that time—and the reason they quit coming was the ’16 flood. So at that time, that whole area was really very bustling and very large. Bat Cave was getting to be a big and busy town as well.

Partial Transcript: I’m guessing that they just—it was time—part of that “Go west, young man” time—because his brother, John, was in Long Beach, California, and John and Joe were back visiting—Joe was my grandfather—were back visiting with their families when the 1916 flood-hit because they both had one-year-old children and they were showing them off and all that. And it had been a long while since they had been home, and I guess they decided to come at the same time so they could see each other as well as everybody else. And I—he just went to make his fortune. And he worked for the Northern Pacific Railroad as a fireman. And he and—and we have pictures of my grandmother and he—they had been hunting and fishing. And grandma was wearing pants and all that kind of stuff. And the women got the vote in 1916 in Montana. So I often wonder if she didn’t feel like she had been put back in a box when they came back here because she didn’t wear pants anymore, she didn’t act in amateur theatricals and all that, because we don’t have any pictures of anything like that after they came home.

Partial Transcript: I don’t know what so much except that, at that time, Hickory Nut Gap Road went between Rutherfordton and Asheville. And it had been a main—a main highway for a long time. And it still was. And until we got interstates, it stayed a main road for a long time. And so there was a lot of people through. And there were mills, and there were a post office and lots of little stores and a few places to stay and that kind of thing. And there were a lot of people who lived there. After the flood—in August, after the flood in July—my grandfather wrote his brother, and he said—there was a convent of nuns that were in Bat Cave at the time—and he said that at one point, they had thirty-two people staying with the nuns. And if you stop and think about it, that’s a lot of people considering what’s there now. And so it was pretty much a little bustling, thriving place until it—the flood pretty much wiped it off the map.

Partial Transcript: Okay. Mountain View Inn. And it was owed by James Mills Flack and his wife, Lavinia Davis Flack. They had Pine—what is now Pine Gables. They had rented it when they were first married and had a store there and ran the post office there. And then they had a boarding house briefly in Asheville. And they went back to Shelby, where she was from, because that’s where her parents were, and they were getting older. And they stayed there until they died. And Lavinia didn’t like the heat. So they bought this big, rambling house that was being used as a small inn and started running it and added onto it and stuff until they finally built this new addition. And everybody worked at the inn in one capacity or another that lived there.

And they also had adopted a black child as theirs. And my grandfather and his brothers and sister talked about their black sister. And she worked there. And she stayed with the great-grandparents until they were both dead. So she had to have been there, as did everybody else, like all the guests, because it was the middle of July. So you know they had guests. And they were—so I don’t know who all was there, but John and his wife, Ted, Aunt Ted, were there with their new daughter, Leah, who was a year old. And my grandfather, Joe, and his wife, Undine, and their daughter, Myrtle, were there from Montana. And they were there just visiting and had been there for a couple of months when this happened.

And the flood came, and they tried to go out the back door of the inn and stepped off in water up to their waist, which is amazing to me considering where the inn was located because it was located where the parking lot—the Chimney Rock parking lot is now for the town. And the current was too strong, and they went back in and rode the storm out on the top floor of the inn.

There was up to three inches of mud on the floor and stuff and water on the floors. And they drilled holes in the floor and swept the water out and the mud out through the holes in the floors and then patched the floors. And the—we have documents that still have the mud on them from that. And Bell wrote in his book—there’s a man named Bell who wrote a book about—well, he edited it, where he pulled all these different articles and stuff together—about that the pig pen behind the inn coming down in a landslide and being buried under mud and rocks—all the pigs, the pen, and everything. And a day or two later they rooted themselves out and were perfectly fine. (laughs) Now, why that story didn’t get passed down in the family, I don’t know, because it’s too good a story not to tell. But that’s pretty much—and then John and Joe sent back to California and Montana for their stuff and never went back. They stayed here to help because things were just so bad for everybody, not just our family, but everybody.

On the other side of the family, the Haydocks were at home except for my aunt—my oldest aunt, Mary. She was staying with her grandparents—the Mitchell Barnwells. And they were in the house when the house—when the rocks and the trees and the water hit the house and it just started collapsing around them. And they got out the kitchen door. They didn’t have any light. They didn’t have coats. They didn’t have anything. And they went up on a hill and managed, by the grace of God, to be missed by the slides and stuff. And they sat up on the hill all night from about eleven o’clock until after dawn. And when they first got up there—they were all soaked to the skin about the time they walked out of the house because it was raining really hard—and they got up there, and my daddy sat down on the ground. He was just a youngster, and he loved to tell this story. And he said he sat down on the ground, and grandma said, “Get up off that wet ground,” as if he already wasn’t soaked to the skin, but what made it so funny to him was because it was such a mama thing to say. (laughs)

And Aunt Mary was with her grandparents. And the creek changed its path and ran right under the porch of the house. And the chimney almost fell. And the house was tilted. And they got out and went up a hill. And they were carrying things out, hoping that they could get things out. And she talked about carrying a mattress to the top of the hill that she could not later lift—it just—the adrenaline was such. She also talked about that she was going up the hill and stopped and leaned against a tree to rest and then went on up the hill. And when she turned around, the tree was gone. It had been swept away in the slide.

So it was—a lot of people barely missed the slides. And then there were other people that—my grandfather wrote in a letter to his brother that in one family, the slide came, and there were all these children in the house. And it took away the rooms they were sleeping in. They did manage—they were all alive except one. And then in another one’s house, it wiped the children—washed the children away, and they didn’t find them for like a week. And they were dead. There was a lot of that, but a lot of people managed somehow to dodge the slides and the water and make it to safety.

My daddy’s brother, Clyde, married a woman named Ellen Baldwin, and she wrote a book at the end of her life. And she was talking about the 1916 flood in it. And she was a child, and she talked about that it had rained and rained and rained. And the ditches were full, and the spring branch was running over and all that. And then it rained some more. And they saw somebody coming. And they went down, and it was somebody who had rented a cabin from them, lower down on the hill than they were, struggling up to where they were, and carrying her daughter on her shoulder because the water was so deep. And she made it up the hill to stay with them, but she said that it was so loud—the rocks grinding against each other, the water, and everything—was so loud that you couldn’t hear another person talking to you unless they put their lips right to your ear and yelled at you—and that it was awful all night.

And the next day people were out, trying to find—to see if they could help other people. And people would—were of course stranded across creeks and stuff because the creeks that had run near their houses had taken the houses. And they were up on the hill on the other side. And they would string wire across the river and use a flat bottom boat and pull across to get them and bring them back over.

And my grandfather talked in his letter about—that all the soil had washed away. And everything that was to eat had washed away and that his—the hardest job they had in Bat Cave at that time was finding food. And he talked about carrying everything because the horses and the wagons and stuff couldn’t cross the creeks and rivers because all of the bridges were gone and the roads were washed out. So carrying everything from Edneyville, where his mother lived, down to Bat Cave—that they just had to carry everything by hand and that there was no place to plant anything because all the soil was gone. And he didn’t know what they were going to be able to do.

Partial Transcript: I think the topsoil was all gone because they eventually—they moved before it was over. And I’m thinking that’s probably—I don’t know for sure—but I think that’s probably about the time they moved on up into Henderson County, and maybe he got a job. That’s about the time he got the job with the Bonds on Chestnut Gap. They were—well, sorry, lost my train of thought—fell off of it.

Partial Transcript: Don’t have a clue. I do know that they drilled the holes in the floor to get the mud and the water out, and I’m sure there was other cleaning up, too. There is a picture of the inn from up on Chimney Rock Mountain taken about 1920, 1921, and you can see where the slide had come down the mountain or, at least, one big slide that came down the mountain. I’m sure there were others that were more cleaned up by then. And you could see where they had farmed and all. But you can see this big tumble of rocks and stuff, and it was still there all that time later because it was just too big to move with what they had at the time.

They had just built the bridge across to the Chimney Rock Park. Of course, it was gone, and it had to be rebuilt. And they had just built the road to the top, and of course, most of it was gone and had to be rebuilt. And all the roads had to be rebuilt. So there was a lot of stuff that needed doing for a lot of people. And there was a man named—well, M. H. Justice that was a Supreme Court judge in Greensboro, and he had—was in Rutherfordton at the time and had said—sent a letter to Mills saying, “I have some money, but it’s only for those people who are in the most need. And I have some supplies also for them. And if you will distribute it and keep records of it, then I can—and if it’s okay with you—I’ll send that to you.” And he thought that maybe if he sent a bushel of Valentine beans—which I’m not sure exactly what is—he felt like if they were planted, then they might be able to be harvested by September. And so that way—and he also was in hopes that—if he sent some money—that the men who were in most need could be used to fix the roads and the bridges. And they could use that money to pay them. And that way, they could pay the men a wage, and the men could help themselves get out of the hole they were in.

I’m not sure what the Haydocks did. Whether they went and stayed with his mother or what, I don’t know. I do know that my Barnwell great-grandfather who—the house that Mary was in when the flood came—they rolled it back from the river. And that house is still there today on 64.

Partial Transcript: No. I have—well, I have pictures of the inn, but they were all after the flood. And I have a picture of the original inn, which was still there. But I don’t have a picture of just before the flood or—because there weren’t that many cameras in the area, I don’t think. And I—unless—the only aerials you got were if you took pictures from up on one of the mountains. And unfortunately, they weren’t doing a lot of that because it was too hard to haul everything up. (laughs) So I don’t know, because everything—all the cameras were so big and everything. So I don’t know.
No, the Barnwell house. The Haydock house was completely demolished. Mitchell Barnwell’s house—it’s still on 64.
I have a picture of the Haydock house post-flood.
And I have a picture of my aunt about that time. There was a magazine photographer. Don’t ask me which one because I don’t think it was either of the ones I’ve been told. And she looked like a stereotypical mountain woman of the time—the long skirt and the bare feet and the sun hat—standing on a rock where the river had been.

Partial Transcript: Okay. Sorry. I don’t think either Bat Cave or Chimney Rock got back to where they had originally been. I mean—and I think that that is probably—in the twenties—well, maybe Chimney Rock did because in the twenties they had a bank. They had a—they built a theater but—because everybody was banking on the lake and the big, huge resort that was going to be built around the lake for the rich. And everybody was subdividing every piece of land they could get their hands on, selling it. And, hey, the Flacks were right in the middle of that. And then when the hit—when everything fell out because of The Depression, then of course all that started falling apart. And it became what it is now—pretty much a tourist town where people would come for a few days. And it quit becoming—it lost its bank. The theater became a restaurant. You know, it just lost all—and that later became a gift shop—so it just lost all that that it originally had. It had grocery stores and everything. And it’s all gone.

Partial Transcript: After the—after the flood, they—the inn did fine. They continued to have a lot of people come and stay. And a lot of people held big events there because—like I said, 150-seat dining room, you can have a lot big events. And they did have a lot of big events there and continued to do well. And then Mills gave over the running of the inn to his son, John, and he started selling real estate near the coming of the lake. And he had this thing called Bat Cave Manor he was building up in Bat Cave. And then he had this other resort, Lakeview Heights or something like that, he was running—selling lots for in Lake Lure. And he was also—he and Lavinia both were major stockholders in the bank, Chimney Rock Trust. And so they lost a lot when the crash came and later when the bank closed. And then there was a big fire that took out a big chunk of Chimney Rock.

And he had—at that time, he had a dam. And he had an electrical—he provided electricity—until the building of the dam was completed down in Lake Lure, he provided electricity for anybody in the valley that wanted it for fifty cents a month. And then afterward, he agreed that he would just provide it for his family, and so he did—and his inn. And then the fire came, and it wiped out a good chunk—six or so buildings in Chimney Rock and damaged the powerhouse. And I’m thinking that’s probably when that went away. You can still see the remnants of it off the bridge. And that was just kind of the death blow. I mean, the inn kept working, and they still had the inn, but that was really the end of their prosperity.

And then my grandfather, Joe, got tuberculosis during The Depression and lived on the porch but recovered—did fine—which was really amazing for somebody who had tuberculosis but—

Partial Transcript: I gather there’s a stone wall or two up that way that was part of the terracing around the end. But it—if you’re there and you’re up on that hill and then you turn around and then you look back and you see where the river is, it will blow your mind to think of the water being that deep that high up. Now, my aunt and my grandparents built a house over on Southside in Chimney Rock, which still stands. And they used to argue—my mother and my sister—my mother and her sister used to argue about whether or not the flood reached that piece of land because no flood has reached it since. And mother said it didn’t, and Myrtle said it did. But one was one, and one wasn’t born until the next year. So take your choice. (laughs) And it’s the highest piece of land along the river in Chimney Rock. So who knows?

Partial Transcript: Oh. I think one of the big lessons is, watch where you build and think about what you’re going to do if you get into that situation. Where you are going to—because, yes, we haven’t had a flood like that since then, but if that storm last summer that hit South Carolina had done what they originally said it was going to do and hit us, it would have been the same thing over again. And Aunt Mary talked about here in Hendersonville that the land was leveled from where Bi-Lo is now to where King Hardware is now. That’s a lot of water.

And one of my sister’s friends talks about her father had cows. They were kind of where the marsh is now. And they were all drowned. And we don’t think about the fact that all this could be underwater again. And what do you do? And if all the bridges are washed out and the roads are washed out, where does your food come from? Where does your water come from? Where does your power come from? Something to pay some heed to.


As far as what we have learned from the big flood, I think the people whose families were here from before have learned some lessons from it—because you notice they didn’t go back and build right back where they would be in danger, where the worst of the slides were, where the worst of the flooding was. But since that time, people have forgotten. And people are coming and building in all those same spots. And particularly these houses that are on the sides of the mountains are just going to—if we get that kind of rain over that span of time again, so that the ground is saturated, and then we get heavy rain on top of that and it slides like that again, those houses aren’t going to be there. And you don’t want to be in them when they’re not there anymore.

Partial Transcript: I think I’d like to see people pay attention, and at least if that kind of thing is forecast, get out. You can replace the stuff. You can’t replace your family, as many of these people could have told you. And pay attention to that. Pay attention to the weather. Be prepared to move if you have to. You can live there if you want to take that risk, but pay attention and stay more connected to the land and to what’s going on. And pay attention to trying to live more in harmony with everything, rather than trying to dominate everything, because trying to dominate Mother Nature never works well. She’s always going to win.

Partial Transcript: It would be catastrophic again. If we had another flood the same as that one or close or worse, which is also a possibility, it would be equally catastrophic but maybe in slightly different ways. I mean, they’d still have no bridges. You’d still have—they’d have to bring stuff in by helicopter, which at least we have that option now they didn’t have then. But it would still be devastating. If you think about all the infrastructure being removed, it is sobering about what would be left and how you would manage. And look at Katrina. I mean, it was essentially the same thing.

Partial Transcript: No. And a hundred years ago—one of the things that really struck me when I read the letter that my grandfather Haydock wrote his brother, Homer, was in those days, there was no FEMA. In those days, there was no insurance of any kind. And there were no—no ways of getting help, no ways of getting money to help. I mean, you were just completely stuck. And in that way at least, we have improved things somewhat. But it doesn’t mean it makes it completely easy. And it doesn’t make things so that you can just blithely go on with your life.
One of the things to that hit me was, he talked about the fact that Mitchell Barnwell, my great-grandfather Barnwell, was going to have his house rolled back from the creek and re-sited, and today that wouldn’t happen. They would just tear that house down and rebuild it. And that’s—because for one thing, I don’t think people really would think about doing that. They would just think, well, this house is ruined, and we’ve just got—and the creek is running under the porch—and we just have to tear it down. But it was really a much smarter thing to roll it back away from the river so that it could—they could continue to use it. And we don’t think that way anymore. Things are built with kind of a planned obsolescence to them. And it’s cheaper to replace things than it is to fix them. And that always bothers me.

Partial Transcript: See if you can figure out where the slides were, and don’t build on a creek. Don’t build right on—I mean, you can build on some fairly high land, but don’t build right down on the river because it’s not going to end well. I see people all the time do all these—either build right down on the river—because I grew up in Chimney Rock—or build all these elaborate patios and stuff right out to the river and—first little flood that comes by—and we’re not even talking about a 1916 style flood—those are gone. They’re just gone. And I had heard about landslides before. I mean, everybody does. You see it on the news and all that. But it was in the nineties when we had a flood down there that was fairly significant. And I went to get my aunt. And, in fact, it had washed the road out in Bat Cave. And I had to go around through Tryon and up through Number 9 to get to Lake Lure and then on up to Chimney Rock to get my aunt who still lived in our house that was on Southside at the time. And when I went to get her, down below her house were two big fields on either side of the road that a local farmer had been farming. And on one side, it still looked the same. On the other side, against the mountain, it had slid. And the trees were still standing upright because they came down with the mud and the rocks, and they were left standing upright. And those trees are still growing there right now. And I tell you, my grandparents really must have thought about it when they built that house because they sited it carefully. The water that ran down off the mountain went on either side of the house—didn’t touch it. The water never came close from the river. In fact, in the sixties, we had another flood where the water came almost up to the top of the bank, and they had problems everywhere else, but our house was fine. I think that that really—that flood made them think when they bought land and when they built. They had a place they could get—a couple places they could get down to the river and fish, but it wasn’t anywhere near any of the buildings. So I think they really gave that a lot of thought when they bought that place and when they built their house.