OURS TO KEEP
forever
Riders on the Satulah summit. Courtesy of the Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust.
I
What followed was a series of mergers and a widening map. The Association joined the Highlands Community Club in 1934 to become the Satulah Club. It merged again with the Ravenel Park Association in 1987. It took its first conservation easement in 1996, six acres beside the Highlands Biological Station. In the early 2000s, as the work moved into Jackson County and Cashiers, it became the Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust. In 2025, partnering with the Open Space Institute, HCLT bought 104 acres adjoining Whiteside Mountain. The land had been slated for high-end residential development; now instead, HCLT and OSI are planning for future public access. Renfro tells the story of a sourwood on that property. While fundraising for the acquisition, it held its red from the first week of October into November. “I like to say that helped sell the donors on contributing to the project.” One hundred and sixteen years after Satulah, the same decision, made again. “
n 1909 a hotel was planned for the summit of Satulah Mountain. A group of Highlands residents who called themselves the Highlands Improvement Association raised five hundred dollars and bought the land instead. Fifty-six acres, at 4,543 feet. Thomas G. Harbison, writing that year: “The top of Satulah is OURS to keep forever.” They built a stone shelter at the summit for anyone who wanted to stay the night, in their own words, “for the purpose of beholding the beauties of the sunset and the starlit heavens.” The foundation is still up there. “ The Association had been founded twenty- six years earlier, in 1883, to protect, preserve and promote the natural beauty of Highlands. It is the oldest land trust in North Carolina and among the first twenty in the country. Five years after Satulah, in 1914, the Ravenel family gave the organization ten acres at Sunset Rock. It was only the second property it had ever held, and the deed required that the public be allowed to reach it. That is the walk at the front of this feature.
FALL 2026
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