Blue Ridge Country March/April 2023 - 45

FACING PAGE FROM
LEFT: The Cloudland was a
166-room resort; promotional
materials talked about " the
highest human habitation east
of the Rocky Mountains; the
original Cloudland Hotel was
a 20-room balsam structure.
FAR LEFT: The Roan
Mountain site of the
Cloudland is today noted on
a plaque.
LEFT: TGeneral John T.
Wilder was a commmended
Union general and a foundry
owner before building
Cloudland.
MARK PEACOCK
He moved to Johnson City in the mid
1870s where he helped to promote and
build the Charleston, Cincinnati and
Chicago Railroad. He also established a
foundry there, using iron ore shipped to
Johnson City from mines he had invested
in at Cranberry, North Carolina, on
the East Tennessee and Western North
Carolina (ET&WNC) Railroad, known
popularly as the Tweetsie Railroad, so
nicknamed for its " tweet, tweet " train
whistles that echoed through the hills.
In 1877 Wilder built his first hotel atop
Roan Mountain, a small lodge of 20
rooms made from balsam logs and
named the Cloudland Hotel, in deference
to pervasive cloud cover both at
and below the site.
A combination of factors led Wilder to
build a much larger hotel on the mountaintop:
A better road up the mountain;
the Tweetsie bringing people much closer
to the road, along with sociological factors
including a growing wealth class
with keen interest in the idea of geography-based
spots for health, recreation
and affirming their social status.
The result was a 166-room luxury
resort with maple floors and cherry furniture,
a resident doctor, butcher, baker
and even a barber. Guests could golf
(with weighted balls due the elevation),
bowl, hike, fish and play croquet to their
heart's content.
But if you needed to use the bathroom,
you might have to get in line
because those 166 rooms had only one
bathroom among them (though some
sources say four).
The grand dining room was built
with intention precisely on the border
between Mitchell County, North Carolina,
and Carter County, Tennessee. On
the floor of the dining room was a white
line, painted along the border, because it
was legal to serve alcohol in the state of
Tennessee, but was illegal in the state of
North Carolina. Take your drink across
that white line and you risked being arrested
by the sheriff of Mitchell County
or his deputies who often sat in Mitchell
County waiting to arrest anyone with a
drink who crossed the line.
The Cloudland, like other Appalachian
Mountain hotels of the time, touted the
health benefits of a visit, especially for
sufferers from hay-fever, which was a bit
of a fixation in late 19th-century America.
The hotel was popular-visited by the
likes of Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone and
John Muir-but the costs of maintaining
a building atop one of the highest peaks
east of the Mississippi River became too
much to bear for Wilder. The economic
panic of 1893 threatened his finances and
he fell behind on taxes due to both host
states. Wilder lost interest in the property
and tried, unsuccessfully, to sell it.
A caretaker couple stayed on for several
years after the Cloudland closed in
1910. By 1915, the remains were collapsing
into ruin, yielding to the combined
forces of neglect, harsh weather
and vandalism.
Wilder died in 1917 in Jacksonville,
Florida, and by 1919 his heirs were selling
off the former grand hotel in pieces,
hastening its full ruin.
Today the only thing left of the hotel
is a historical marker commemorating
where it sat at the turn of the 20th century
atop Roan Mountain.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
A few details in this piece are from " Resorts in the Southern Appalachians:
A Microcosm of American Resorts in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries " (East Tennessee State University, 2004), a Master's dissertation by
Mary F. Fanslow. Her work provides deep discovery and insight into the social,
economic, sociological and industrial aspects of the phenomenon of health resorts
in the U.S. during the period. Her chapter on the Cloudland is replete with
eminently detailed information on those aspects as well as on General John T.
Wilder, the construction processes, the Cloudland's surrounding communities
and inhabitants and countless other details. View it at dc.etsu.edu/etd/961/
MARCH/APRIL 2023 45
http://dc.etsu.edu/etd/961/
Blue Ridge Country March/April 2023

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