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A Universal Constant
Issue: 2016/06 - June
A day in Highlands is enough to make one thing clear: Change is everywhere.
Visitors pass by on Main Street, meandering towards Old Edwards Inn or looking into the local shops. Familiar faces reappear as couples gone for the winter or simply a week return home. New birds call from just over a ridge or a rhododendron thicket. Even the mountains themselves shift with the rhythms of the year, shedding their dull winter coats for riotous garments of new growth. The earliest trout lilies have long since faded in favor of laurels and rhododendrons blooming as far as the eye can see.
It’s possible to see how this corner of the Blue Ridge has changed on a far longer scale than days or weeks. We have no pictures of what Kelsey and Hutchinson saw when they first began marking out Main Street, but by 1898 a view from Satulah shows houses and farmlands already forming the heart of the town. Comparing the Highlands of 1912 and the Highlands of 2002 as seen from Sunset Rock is a further illustration how much a century has shaped farmlands into forests and cabins into brick and mortar buildings.
And yet, even as Highlands continues to grow, many things have stayed the same. Today Fourth Street crosses Mill Creek at the exact spot of a bridge pictured in 1912. The start of the Kelsey Trail, originally built in 1883, still extends off the end of Fifth Street and winds towards Bear Pen Gap. The view from Sunset Rock is just as spectacular. There are still more places, now protected by conservation easements through the Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust, that will look no different in photographs taken a hundred years from now. There will be new visitors, new families, but thanks to conservation minded landowners, some things will never change.
To learn more about Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust’s mission to protect valuable land resources for all generations visit hicashlt.org or call (828) 526-1111. Become a member today and help preserve our most treasured places.
