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The Grimshawe Tragedy: Highlands History
Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: March-2022
The age-worn walls of the Grimshawe’s Post Office are steeped in almost unimaginable tragedy.
If you look closely at Henry Scadin’s photo of Grimshawe’s world’s smallest post office in 1899, you’ll note a tangle of strangling vines climbing the hut’s left wall.
After its construction, Mother Nature seemed to declare, “I’m repossessing my lumber and land.”
Her reclamation didn’t stop there. She took four (eventually five) of the Grimshawe’s children with the diphtheria epidemic that swept through late 1800s to early 1900s.
The mini-post office made a 6’ x 5.5’ footprint on Whiteside Cove just below Whiteside Mountain’s high cliff.
Thomas and Helena Grimshawe established the office in 1878, four years after settling in the Cove. Eventually their son, Thomas, and wife, Bessie, took over not only the post office duties, but tending the sick.
Their son Thomas was the only doctor in the area. If there were a statue of him, he’d carry a doctor’s bag in one hand, a mailbag in the other, and the grim in his name enshrouded in his face.
In late fall, while Thomas was miles away tending patients, his own children, four daughters, were stricken with diphtheria. Bessie nursed them as best she could in his absence.
Alas, every other day between October 31 and November 7, 1888, another daughter passed away.
One at a time, Bessie built a coffin, dug a grave, then conducted a service from a Prayer Book as no priest or preacher was available at that time of year.
Thomas knew nothing of this until he returned home. Upon hearing of the four illnesses and subsequent funerals, he was devastated. Imagine this couple’s unbearable grief. As if that weren’t enough, a fifth child was taken by the same disease a decade later.
The Grimshawe story was so heart-wrenching, the Smithsonian documented some of its trials, and a picture of the post office hangs in Washington. Today you can visit the Grimshawe children’s burial plots behind the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Cashiers.
After all their loss, the Grimshawes kept going. Perhaps their English lineage gave them stiff upper lips – surely cast of iron. They even spoke the Elizabethan English of their ancestry.
And so it was for the pioneers of Highlands. Mother Nature was as kind as she was cruel.
We are a century past some of her worst on the Plateau, and grateful for it as we close Winter’s door on one of its saddest stories and welcome the new life of Spring.
To learn more about the Plateau’s sorrows and joys, read Ran Shaffner’s Heart of the Blue Ridge. Or you can visit
highlandshistory.com or email [email protected].
