Landscapes reveal stories! Stories that reveal the processes and complexities of nature as well as that of humankind. People have both shaped and been shaped by the landscapes they encounter. Here on this 245 acre estate, today known as Connemara Farms, there are many stories and layers of human history.
Though we have no physical evidence here of the early native people, we know from historical studies that this land was occupied and used by native people for thousands of years before european expansion into the New World. The large flat rock outcrops in the area were used as trading grounds between native tribes, and early pioneers. This also supported the trade route that went up into Asheville market, a road known as the "drovers road" in which livestock and goods were channeled from the low county up to the mountains.
Through these early traveling routes, this community came to be called Flat Rock, and drew wealthy folks from the developing coastal cities like Charleston, and Savannah into the hills. By the early 1830's many "summer homes" were being built in the foothills and south of Asheville, which was established in 1797.
The place known as Connemara Farms was built in 1838 for Chistopher Memminger, a lawyer and enslaver from Charleston, SC, The next resident was Ellyson Smythe, a textile baron who employeed children in his fiber mills. Then in 1945, over a century after the estate was built, Sandburg and his family bought the 245 acre estate in 1945, to support his wife Paula's goat dairy operation, and because it offered solitude for his writing. Sandburg died on July 22, 1967 at his home in Flat Rock, NC, at age 89. The nation mourned him as writer, biographer, folksinger, lecturer, and Poet of the People who spoke for those who did not have words or power to speak for themselves. He was eulogized on September 17,1967 at the Lincoln Memorial. His ashes were buried at his birthplace in Galesburg, Illinois on October 1st. In 1968 Congress authorized Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site, the first unit of the National Park Service to honor a poet.
The links below will invite you to learn more about the site significance and its prior history as a home to a Charleston lawyer and enslaver, a businessman who employed child labor for his cotton mills, and finally to the poet and writer Carl Sandburg!
Historic Resource Study of African American History at the Site
This Historic Resource Study, Black Lives and Whitened Stories: From the Lowcountry to the Mountains, by David and Anne Whisnant, explores the history of African Americans and the larger racial dynamics at Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site over a period of more than a century, beginning in the 1830s.
