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Hugh MacRae By Ralph Grizzle In 1945, a reporter was talking with Hugh Morton, owner of Grandfather Mountain and grandson of Hugh MacRae, the Wilmington, North Carolina, industrialist, agriculturist and resort developer. Though the eighty-year-old MacRae's list of entrepreneurial achievements was legendary, not to mention broadly varied, his grandson knew which made his grandfather's heart race most. "His passion in life is agriculture," Morton said at the time. "Some men think that the most beautiful thing in the world is a good-looking woman. Others put a thoroughbred horse or a trim yacht at the head of the list. I believe the most beautiful thing in the world to grandfather is a herd of cows grazing in a nice pasture." During his eight-and-a-half decades in North Carolina, MacRae took on a variety of projects. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he worked mica, feldspar and kaolin deposits as a mining engineer near Spruce Pine. He later acquired 16,000 acres encompassing Grandfather Mountain and formed the Linville Improvement Company, which developed the town of Linville, that later became an exclusive resort community at the base of Grandfather Mountain. To provide access to his town, MacRae constructed Yonahlossee (sometimes spelled Honahlossee, Cherokee for "trail of the black bear") Road between Linville and Blowing Rock. All of this (with more to come), and it was grazing cows that MacRae loved best. MacRae believed that for farmers to sustain themselves, they had to keep their fields green in winter. Commenting on the economic decline in the South, MacRae said in 1934, "I feel sure that we have got to rebuild our economic structure beginning at the base, which means a reshaping of rural life." MacRae, a short, stocky man with boundless energy, invested much of his life in an effort to overhaul southern agriculture. He argued that by raising only tobacco, corn and cotton, southern farmers were depleting their land. On his 1,400-acre dairy farm in Pender County, which he called Invershiel in recognition of his family's Scottish heritage, he spent three decades developing a grazing program that would support his Black Angus herd year-round. He cultivated fifty fields, encompassing some 750 acres, to experiment with feed crops. In some fields, MacRae used hay, corn and dairy feed, racking up a deficit at the end of the season. In others, he released his herd into spreads of vetch, clovers and hearty grasses. Through trials, he eventually found five crops, consisting of clovers and grasses, which were ideal for year-round grazing. He had proved, at least to his own satisfaction, that the South could be made the nation's leading beef and dairy cattle region because of its fertile land and longer growing season. With the promise of prosperity, he then tried to persuade Midwestern farmers to relocate to North Carolina's "green winters." Even before his Carolina Trucking Company printed brochures and hired agents to scout for potential families to settle the communities he had developed to carry on his experiments, he had extended his offer across the Atlantic. Europeans responded favorably, and between 1905 and 1909 MacRae colonized six rural communities in three southeastern counties. The immigrants paid $240 for a three-bedroom house and $300 for a 10-acre tract of farmland. To ensure that the denizens would be prosperous and continue to reproduce, MacRae gave brides five-dollar gold pieces and ten dollars in gold to each child born in the settlements. He loaned money for fertilizer, seeds and equipment to make the land itself prosperous. At first, the communities were kept nationally distinct - with Hollanders comprising Van Eeden and Castle Hayne; Germans and Hungarians populating New Berlin (later renamed Delco due to anti-German sentiment); Greeks making their homes in Marathon; Poles in Artesia; and Italians at St. Helena. Their farms became prosperous, with The State magazine reporting in 1945 that New Hanover County ranked second in per farm income in the South. The immigrant population's prosperity was equally demonstrated by the fact that they were able to repay their notes, for houses and land, at a time when the country was only recently emerging from the throes of the Great Depression. "During a period when emergency calls for farm relief were being made from every section of the country," reported The State in 1934, "the farmers who had settled in these colonies . . . were paying off not only notes that were due but notes that would not be due until one and two years hence. While the cancerous depression was eating the core out of farming financially . . . these colonies were teeming with prosperity in comparison." The communities thrived despite such setbacks as the state legislature's prohibition law that put an end to the manufacture of wine, pinching off the livelihood of Italian grape growers in St. Helena. The resilient Italians switched to dairy farming, producing impressive amounts of milk and other dairy products. The communities were situated along the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, MacRae promoted export of their produce to markets in Baltimore and New York. From Castle Hayne, farms annually shipped 250 carloads of fresh vegetables to northern markets. Dutch settlers shipped 10,000 cartons of flowers and bulbs abroad each season. Born March 30, 1865, Hugh was the son of Julia Norton and Donald MacRae, a merchant, manufacturer and farmer who served as British vice-consul in Wilmington prior to the Civil War. Scottish blood coursed through the infant's veins. His great-great-grandfather set a course from Scotland to land in Wilmington in 1770. Entrepreneurial blood was also part of his heritage. His grandfather was president of the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad. Hugh was born in Carbonton, the MacRae's summer place. Donald MacRae considered Wilmington to be unsafe for his expectant wife as the fight for strategic Fort Fisher raged on at the end of the Civil War. But when Federal occupation of the port city ended, the MacRaes returned home. Hugh was two years old. He attended school in Wilmington, and later in Mebane, at Bingham's School. At age sixteen, he entered MIT and graduated at age twenty in 1885. The next year, the young college graduate began work as a mining engineer at Bailey Mountain, near Spruce Pine. A friend of his father's had become impressed with the scenic possibilities in the area that would become Linville, so Donald MacRae asked his son to go look at the valley. The sturdy young man made his way on horseback into Avery County. Overwhelmed by the beauty he found there, he wrote to his father for funds to purchase the near 16,000 acres, mostly owned to Walter Waightstill Lenoir, grandson of General William Lenoir, for whom the town of Lenoir is named. In 1889, the MacRaes formed the Linville Improvement Company, purchased the land and began building a town. To make Linville accessible by carriage from Blowing Rock, MacRae's company built the Yonahlossee road along the southern slope of Grandfather Mountain along a route that later became part of US 221. "The state simply came along and paved it," said Hugh Morton, boasting of his grandfather's engineering prowess. "Not a single curve has been straightened since 1892." MacRae's dream was for a fully functional village but legal entanglements stalled land sales and new settlers were slow to arrive. Meanwhile, temporary residents in the form of summer tourists flocked to Linville's hotel, the Eseeola. By the turn of the century it had become a popular mountain retreat featuring cool mountain air, fine trout fishing and golf on what may have been one of the first courses in the state. (The first was at Cape Fear Country Club, where MacRae was a member, which opened in 1996. The previous winter MacRae told club members Eseeola guests had been playing the season before.) By 1913, tourists had fully discovered this rich region of western North Carolina and summer homes covered with chestnut bark harvested from the company's saw mills began filling the valley. Linville became a stop on the Eastern Tennessee & Western North Carolina Railroad, known as Tweetsie because of the shrill whistle of its narrow gauge steam engines. A horseback trail that lead to the Grandfather Mountain overlook known as Cliffside was widened into a one-lane road for automobiles, whose drivers paid a toll to travel up the mountain to a wooden viewing platform. MacRae's heart was not in resort building. Despite the hotel's success, he remained mostly to Wilmington where he was president of Wilmington Cotton Mills Company and the head of Wilmington Gas Light Company, which later merged with the Wilmington Street Railway and the Seacoast Railway to become the Consolidated Railways, Light and Power Company. This entity eventually became the Tide Water Power Company, which MacRae sold in 1929, but not before using it to improve the quality of life in New Hanover County. In Chronicles of the Cape Fear River, author James Sprunt wrote of the Tide Water Power Company in 1916, "All the electric railway, electric light, electric power and gas systems not only in the city of Wilmington but in all New Hanover County are owned and operated by this company, and its success is due chiefly to the enterprise and excellent management of Hugh MacRae." Along the tracks that Wilmington Street Railway operated to the beach, MacRae developed the Wilmington suburban areas of Winter Park, Oleander and Audubon. He extended the line to Carolina Place, Sunset Park and Carolina Heights to hasten development in these outlying areas. In 1905 and 1906, to develop the seaside resort of Wrightsville Beach, he erected the legendary pavilion Lumina. But even with all of this to occupy him, MacRae was already at work on what would become the chief interest in his life - agriculture, land development, promotion and more settlements. In the years following his experiments at Castle Hayne and the other rural communities, MacRae's agricultural successes caught the eye of the Roosevelt administration, which called upon the Wilmingtonian to head up a Depression-era subsistence homestead project in Pender County for the Department of the Interior. President and manager of the resettlement project at Penderlea, MacRae told The State in 1934 that he considered the 4,500-acre tract to be "the best planned rural community in the world." A model farm community, Penderlea was developed to demonstrate the "transformation that can be effected in rural life, particularly in the Southern states, at the same time offering a better chance to families brought together in a group than they would have under isolated conditions . . . " One hundred families were to arrive shortly. "Community gardens will have been planted and 40,000 cans of food put up so that no family will be in want while waiting the products of their own garden, which will be already cleared, drained, prepared and in readiness for the planting of winter crops." The fertile soils of Penderlea, and the attractive government subsidies, represented hope to homesteaders who were down on their luck or who had farmed out their own soils. Unfortunately, Penderlea was not to last. World War II enabled Americans to find jobs, and when the war ended, the new developing prosperity in the rapidly industrializing South allowed more people to abandon subsistence farming. MacRae died October 20, 1951, at age eighty-six in Wilmington's James Walker Memorial Hospital, the birthplace of his grandson Hugh Morton, who carried on his grandfather's legacy at Grandfather Mountain. MacRae's widow, Rena, remained the grand dame of Linville for years. In 1952, she was the first person to step across the famous swinging bridge her grandson opened on Grandfather Mountain. For his exceptional achievement in southern agriculture and industry, MacRae was awarded an honorary degree by the University of North Carolina in the years before his death. |
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