Treasures and Tickets

Written By: Stuart Ferguson | Issue: August 2024

What sounds good for breakfast? Radishes? Picked Up Codfish in Cream?

Better save room for the Minced Sweetbreads on Toast!

That’s from the Sunday, Oct. 15, 1905, menu of the Toxaway Inn. To be fair, guests could also get steak, eggs and griddle cakes.

“Luncheon” a few hours later offered roast beef and dinner featured escalloped oysters and pear fritters with claret sauce.

Thanks to the wonderful, fascinating, 2004 Ticket to Toxaway by Jan C. Plemmons – itself a major updating and revision of her 1984 Treasures of Toxaway – readers can go back to Lake Toxaway’s first heyday when from 1903 until 1916 (when the dam impounding the lake failed disastrously), a 200-room hotel sat on its eastern shore. Guests enjoyed hiking, swimming, fishing and boating (gas and electric launches, sailboats, rowboats and canoes); horse and carriage rides on the vast property; a nine-hole golf course; a dance orchestra and of course all those lovely vittles.

But the Toxaway Company’s 26,000-acre fiefdom stretched up to the Sapphire Lodge (which burned in the early 20th century) on Sapphire Lake and on to the Fairfield Inn on Fairfield Lake, which was still standing in the mid-1980s, when I remember having dinner there and being waited on by a high-school buddy.

While “Ticket” discusses all three inns, along with the tanning and lumbering businesses nearby, its main focus is the Toxaway Inn, and is comprised of awesome photos and reprints of local newspaper stories, brought together by a good narrative and reminiscences of those involved. The small-but-stunning images of the grand Inn’s towers rising above the forest, with a cloud-capped Toxaway Mountain looming across the lake, remind you of the Adirondacks or White Mountains.

As Brevard’s Sylvan Valley News said of Toxaway in 1903: “Mere words fail to convey the true beauties of this magnificent section…No flights of poesy are needed in this case and none will be indulged in.”

Ms. Plemmons, an educator and historian who was born in Buncombe County and has degrees from Mars Hill and East Tennessee State, still lives on Lake Toxaway, which she discovered in 1972 – a decade after a new dam restored its glorious waters.

If you’re lucky, you can find Ms. Plemmons’s books for sale online, and the Transylvania County Library in Brevard has multiple copies available.

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.