LINVILLE FALLS 339 
sends out many carloads of the beautiful things that 
grow here and which find their way, not only to 
different parts of our own country, but all over 
Europe. This nursery owes its existence to Mr. S. T. 
Kelsey, of New York State, who came here from 
Kansas, and, with the energy and optimism of the 
North and the West combined, tried to transform 
the mountains. But he came too soon; the hour 
of awakening had not struck; so when he laid out 
a whole town on the Highlands plateau after the 
Western fashion, the people looked on In amaze- 
ment and Highlands remained untransformed, as 
remained the rest of the mountains at that time, 
excepting for the roads he projected. For Mr. 
Kelsey had yet greater genius for making roads than 
towns, and laid out the finest of those first made In 
the mountains, among them the beautiful Yonah- 
lossee Road that crosses the southern slopes of the 
Grandfather Mountain, scarcely changing its grade 
for a distance of nearly twenty miles. It was also 
Mr. Kelsey who planned LInville with Its hotels 
and its lake. But the best thing he did was making 
the gardens and taming the most decorative and 
beautiful of the wild growths, not only the royal 
rhododendrons, laurel, and azaleas, and the noble 
forest trees, but the silver-bell, the sourwood, the 
leucothoe, the yellow-root, the wild lilies and or- 
chids, and a hundred other charming wild flowers, 
including Shortia that gave the botanists such long 
search, Inducing them to tolerate the limitations of 
a man-made garden, and also to bloom yet more 
