On a summer evening at The Village Green in Cashiers, the Highlands‑Cashiers Film Festival will invite the community to settle in for a story that feels as much inherited as it is told.
On July 30, the festival will screen Rise, Ruin, and Restoration: A History of Lake Toxaway, the Emmy Award‑winning Dan Johnson’s documentary tracing the lake’s creation, the 1916 dam collapse, and the decades‑later effort to bring the mountain lake back to life.
The evening begins with a reception at 5:00 P.M., followed by the film at 5:30 P.M. and a conversation with Johnson, but its deeper subject is remembrance — a return to a landscape whose history still lies close to the surface.
Longtime Toxaway resident John Leroy Nichols III, a producer who filmed many interviews in 2012, sees the documentary as both regional history and family story. The grandson of Reginald Davies Heinitsh, one of the men behind the lake’s 20th‑century revival, Nichols speaks of Lake Toxaway as inheritance as much as place.
“The original developers came south from Pennsylvania drawn by timber, gold and sapphires, but they stayed for the mountains, the water and the elevation,” Nichols explains. “Those entrepreneurs eventually created a resort where the who’s who came from all over the world to spend summer weeks in the cool mountain air.”
That first chapter ended abruptly in 1916 when the dam failed and the lake drained away.
“When they rebuilt the lake in 1960, the interesting thing to me is that the same kind of successful people came right back, just like before,” Nichols said.
Even now, he added, “a lot of the people here could live anywhere in the world, and they’ve chosen this spot all over again.” In his telling, Lake Toxaway’s appeal has always been more than practical — it is a place people return to because it answers something they cannot quite find elsewhere.
Johnson says he was drawn to the chance to tell the story of a place he has visited since childhood. “I was particularly inspired by the life and legacy of Lucy Armstrong Moltz whose Toxaway mansion would eventually become the Greystone Inn. Her generous spirit and impact endure to this day,” he said.
That sense of place is part of what inspired the Highlands‑Cashiers Film Festival to organize the screening. Artistic Director Joy Jorgensen said the festival was created out of “a love of film, creativity, and community” and has grown into a celebration of storytelling that brings filmmakers, artists and audiences together. In that light, Rise, Ruin, and Restoration feels like a natural fit — a film shaped by memory, history and conversation, turning a familiar mountain landscape into something newly seen.
The Highlands‑Cashiers Film Festival’s regular 2026 season is scheduled for September 17 through 20. For more information about programs, films and personalities, visit highlandscashiersfilmfestival.com.
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