New Leaves
Preserving the “Peterboro of the South”:
Huckleberry Mountain Workshop Camp and Artists’ Colony
By RoAnn M. Bishop
EDITOR'S NOTE: RoAnn M. Bishop is oil associate curator at the North Carolina Museum of History. She
earned a B.A. degree in journalism and political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and
an M.A. in public history from Middle Tennessee State University. A native of Henderson County, she first
became interested in the Huckleberry Mountain Workshop Camp and Artists ' Colony as a young girl. Her
piano teacher, Leonora Wilkinson, owned a studio-lodge on the grounds of the colony.
The narrow dirt road that wiggled up the slope of Huckleberry Mountain some sixty
years ago still winds through the Huckleberry community of Henderson County today.
Pitted with potholes and punctured by rocks, the road snakes its way through sun-dappled
woods and rhododendron thickets and pushes past little log cabins nearly hidden among
the trees. Six decades ago, these cabins boasted names such as “Sonnet House” and “Sing¬
ing Brook” and were filled with the sounds of clattering typewriters and musical instru¬
ments. 1 T oday, they are all that remain of the once-thriving and nationally known
Huckleberry Mountain Workshop Camp and Artists’ Colony.
However, two new Huckleberry property owners are hoping to refocus attention on
the old camp and colony. Dr. Ida Simpson, a sociology professor at Duke University, and
her son Frank are working with the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources to
preserve Huckleberry’s unique history and architecture and ultimately have it listed on the
National Register of Historic Places.
“This is truly a fascinating little part of Henderson County,” said Frank Simpson, a
horticulturist who lives in Chapel
НШ.
“It would have developed at the same time as
Black Mountain [College] was going on. But this one has been forgotten.”2
In 1939, when Evelyn Grace Haynes opened Huckleberry six miles east of
Hendersonville, it numbered among the first writers’ workshops in the United States.3
Using the MacDowell Colony in Peterboro, New Hampshire, the nation’s oldest artists’
colony, as a model, Haynes set out to transfomi a former girls’ summer camp into “the
Peterboro of the South” — a quiet mountain retreat where artists could come to share ideas
and knowledge, find inspiration, and hone their skills amidst nature’s beauty.4
Haynes quickly succeeded. After A. M. Mathieu, editor of Writer’s Digest, visited the
workshop camp in the summer of 1941, he wrote: “Huckleberry is ideal for full-time
writing. Alone, in a cabin in the mountains, with a typewriter and a stack of clean white
paper, the writer discovers himself anew. The rumpled Carolina mountains strung
unevenly along the horizon shut out a nervous twitching world, and the air is burdened
with a scent the perfumers never capture. You can write all day, in peace, and ideas,
aborning, go straight to the typewriter.”5 The New York Times, in a 1942 Sunday travel
section, noted Huckleberry as one of two writers’ colonies in the South,6 and Life Maga¬
zine at about the same time called it “one of the top five cultural centers in the entire
United States.”7
During its twenty-year existence, the Huckleberry workshop camp provided instruc¬
tion to hundreds of students from across the United States and several foreign countries.8
Well-known professionals in various arts taught poetry, painting, music, drama, fiction and
nonfiction writing, radio scriptwriting, weaving, pottery, photography, metalworking, and
nature studies. Some of these artists and writers bought lots in the colony and built private
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