Remembering Highlands

Written By: Stuart Ferguson | Issue: September 2024

Isabel and Tony Chambers, 1951

It’s titled Remembering Highlands: From Pioneer Village to Mountain Retreat for good reason: Isabel Hall Chambers and Overton Chambers (AKA the married Isa and Tony) either remembered what they wrote about in this compilation of articles that originally ran in The Laurel, or knew the people who did. Isabel descended from Barak and Mary Norton, the first settlers in Whiteside Cove in the 1820s; about a century later Tony’s parents, Overton and Dayis Chambers of Chicago, began spending summers here off Buck Creek Road.

Thank heavens publishers Janet and Marjorie had the good sense to approach Tony and Isabel to contribute a historical column to this magazine back in 2002! Most of the stories were Isabel’s, while Tony – an English major at Dartmouth – polished the prose.

After Isabel died this past June, I reread Remembering Highlands, which I had always meant to feature here – as I had Tony’s two novels set in a fictional locale resembling Highlands in the November 2022 Laurel – but thought I had some time, as at age 93 Isabel was more with it than most people are at 23. Not that she needed or sought publicity: There she was in church; or still working at the family’s Chambers Agency realty; practicing with the dulcimer group at Founders Park; playing bridge; or advising the Highlands Historical Society.

Isabel and boredom were never in the same room together. She was wise and funny and caring and the 2009 Remembering Highlands distills those qualities in every chapter. Just now I read about Highlands’s first gift shop (Root’s); Isa being frightened by a “ghost” during a girlhood visit to World’s End, the Eskrigge place on Satulah; and Lula Norton and Minnie Buchanan’s weaving workshop in the Norton community – part of the Appalachian crafts revival of the 1920s and 30s – which was successively known as the Dye Pot, Cabin Weavers and Buckey’s Handweaving.

Isabel and Tony Chambers, 2009

The final chapters of Remembering Highlands are devoted to Isabel’s parents: That man-about-town, real-estate broker and insurance agent Tudor Norton Hall, whose funeral salute was provided by his own collection of historic artillery (and who sold my parents their first Highlands cottage, c. 1967); and Margaret Gilbert Hall, Tudor’s partner in business and in life, and longtime mainstay of the Church of the Incarnation. Isa’s tribute to her in The Laurel was headlined Farewell to a Queen, and that’s how I now salute Margaret’s daughter, Isabel Hall Chambers.

by Stuart Ferguson,
local historian, armchair traveler, and irrepressible raconteur. He reviews books for The Highland Hiker, which maintains an extensive collection of local literature.