112 THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
the air one breathes is not the air of Traumfest, for 
we have ascended a thousand feet, and to the soft- 
ness of the Southern air is added a fine, keen quality 
that wakes one up. In time the train reaches Flat 
Rock, one of the oldest and most interesting places 
in the mountains, although one can see nothing of it 
from the railway station. 
Long before a train had surmounted the barrier 
wall of the Blue Ridge, the beauty, and salubrity of 
the high mountains had called up from the eastern 
lowlands people of wealth and refinement to make 
here and there their summer homes. The first and 
most important of these patrician settlements was 
at Flat Rock, the people coming from Charleston, 
the centre of civilization in the Far South, and 
choosing Flat Rock because of its accessibility, and 
because the level nature of the country off ered oppor- 
tunity for the development of beautiful estates and 
the making of pleasure roads through the primeval 
forest that in those days had not been disturbed. 
Into the great, sweet wilderness, now quite safe from 
Indians, these children of fortune brought their ser- 
vants and their laborers, and selecting the finest 
sites, whence were extensive views of the not too 
distant mountains, surrounded by the charming 
growths of the region, in a land emblazoned and 
carpeted with flowers, built their homes of refuge 
from the burning heat and the equally burning mos- 
quitoes of the coast land. 
The train comes from the seacoast to-day, but 
half a century ago it was much more of an under- 
