By Winston Groom | Nov 08 | 

The Original Hideout

Why Southerners keep flocking to North Carolina's High Hampton Inn

In a once-secluded valley high in the southern Appalachians, there’s an old hotel, a lodge, really, that’s been a summer home to countless generations of flatlanders, stupefied to this very day that there’s actually a place in the Deep South where eighty degrees in July is considered a heat wave.

To get there, go to Cashiers (pronounced cash-urs), North Carolina, a lovely little village in the process of being “discovered” by developers who, in the past decade or so, have begun crowding it with golf course developments of million-dollar homes. But a mile or two from the heart of town—which is little more than a crossroads of ever-more-trendy “shoppes”—the scene dissolves into a verdant tunnel, walled in by a hedge of giant rhododendrons shaded by 150-foot-tall white pines. Turn in to the left, right past the sunny dahlia garden, and enter the magical kingdom of the High Hampton Inn.

High Hampton is not for the faint of heart, by which I mean those who expect the exquisite luxury of the Greenbrier, the Homestead, or the Cloister at Sea Island. (But you won’t faint when you get the bill, either.) It is what it is, which is a good thing, especially if you have children, because you will see children. They may be at the Teddy Bear Picnic, hiking nature trails, swimming in the large private lake, or on the donkey-cart rides in the evenings to marshmallow roasts at the picnic grounds up in the woods. In fact, staying at High Hampton is something akin to going to camp with your kids, except you only have to fool with them when you want to. Children’s activities go on day and night.

People have been vacationing at High Hampton since 1922. Prior to that, the 1,400-acre property was the mountain retreat of South Carolina governor and Civil War general Wade Hampton III, who commanded Lee’s cavalry after J.E.B. Stuart was killed. After Hampton’s descendants died, the McKee family bought the property and built the lodge. To this day the family runs it as a resort hotel from April to November.

William “Bill” McKee, a Harvard man who was a fixture at the place for more than fifty years until his death in 2004 at the age of eighty-nine, maintained it in the delightful old Southern tradition of casual formality (e.g., jacket and tie are still required for dinner in the large family-style dining hall). On the other hand, there was until recently a certain genteel shabbiness about High Hampton.

An apocryphal story still goes around about a couple who spent their wedding night at the inn’s Honeymoon Cottage nearly forty years ago. Soon the couple noticed that one of the bedsprings squeaked—a distraction—so the guy wrapped a wire coat hanger around it to silence the thing. Upon returning to High Hampton for their thirty-fifth anniversary, the couple again asked for the Honeymoon Cottage, and, once ensconced, the guy remembered the offending spring and looked under the mattress. Sure enough, the coat hanger was still there, doing its duty.

Today, young Will McKee, Bill’s son, who is now running the inn, has completely redone the 120 guest rooms in the lodge and the seventeen guest cottages, with handmade twig and mountain crafted furniture, up-to-date baths, a first-rate health spa, and the charmingly refurbished Rock Mountain Tavern. One can safely assume the bedspring business is history.