Labor Day weekend marks the traditional end of America’s summer, a season when Floridians for decades have sought respite from our hot, soggy weather in the high country of western North Carolina.
As I write this, I’m returning from such an escape myself.
While others dream of palm trees, beaches and Mickey, some Floridians long for cool nights and mountain vistas. It’s been that way for a long time.
Around Labor Day in the Roaring Twenties, for example, the social pages of Orlando newspapers brimmed with reports of residents returning from the North Carolina mountains.
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“Fletcher Proctor returned Sunday from a three months’ stay in North Carolina,” the paper noted on Sept. 8, 1925. “Miss Mary Spear has returned from Montreat, N.C., where she spent several weeks,” according to a Sept. 10 item; other returnees included “Mrs. Phil Slemons and daughters” and “Miss Elizabeth Harris,” who stopped over in Atlanta for several days after a month in Hendersonville.
Ties to ‘Land of the Sky’
The ties that bind Central Florida and western North Carolina are more complex, and longer, than the bonds created by the many area folks who have second homes there.
The economies of both regions have long depended heavily on tourism. In his 2005 book, “Creating the Land of the Sky,” historian Richard Starnes notes that Southerners began seasonal escapes to the Carolina mountains well before the Civil War, when low-country planter families sought respite from the heat and also from the mosquitoes that could make summer a deadly “fever season.”
But it was after the Civil War and the coming of the railroads that tourism emerged “as an important part of the social and economic reality of the New South” in areas including Florida and the Carolina mountains, Starnes writes.
Tourism boosters noted the similarity between the appeal of both Florida and the mountains — depending, of course, on the season. Writing in 1883, one North Carolina newspaper editor suggested that folks split their time between the two states, an arrangement that offered “a life of perpetual spring time and flowers.”
Going home to Asheville
In western North Carolina, most permanent residents lived lives completely separate from those they came to call “the summer people.”
But for many in North Carolina, as in Florida, the seasonal visitors offered income that was otherwise hard to come by.
I’m reminded of this when I visit one of my favorite spots in Asheville, N.C.: the boyhood home of the novelist Thomas Wolfe in the sprawling former boarding house his mother, Julia, ran for visitors to the area (see wolfememorial.com).
This is not the author Tom Wolfe, known for his white suits and books including “Bonfire of the Vanities.” The earlier Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), perhaps North Carolina’s best-known literary son, gained fame through his 1929 novel “Look Homeward, Angel,” in which the fictional Gant family mirrored Wolfe’s own upbringing in Asheville.
Like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Florida’s own Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Wolfe was edited by the legendary Maxwell Perkins of Charles Scribner’s Sons. (An upcoming movie, “Genius,” stars Jude Law as Wolfe and Colin Firth as Perkins.) When Wolfe died at 38, his Time magazine obituary noted that, of his peers, he was perhaps the writer of whom the most had been expected.
Although his expansive, poetic novels are not read as much as they once were, he remains a fascinating, influential Southern writer. It was Wolfe who made the phrase “you can’t go home again” part of the American vocabulary.
Wolfe’s mother, an astute businesswoman, not only ran her Asheville boarding house but also became a devoted land speculator, buying parcels in – where else – Florida.
“Perhaps,” Wolfe once wrote, “this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America – that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.”
Many of us will be in movement on this holiday weekend. Be cool and be safe, wherever you are.
Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at jwdickinson@earthlink.net, FindingJoyinFlorida.com, or by good old-fashioned letter at the Sentinel, 633 N. Orange Ave., Orlando, FL 32801.
Copyright © 2015, Orlando Sentinel
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