The American Queen by Vanessa Miller

This past week, Denise Cumbee Long stepped down from her position as Executive Director of United Way of Henderson County.  Denise’s successful retirement comes after 9 1/2 very productive years at the helm of a foundational nonprofit that has been at the heart of this county’s philanthropic efforts for over seven decades

Throughout her tenure at United Way, this extraordinary woman poured her heart and soul into making Henderson County a better place for all of us to live. Her story has been, indeed, Good News for our community.

This past Thursday, the new owners of The Gallery at Flat Rock, Julie and Phil Wilmot, hosted a farewell reception for the gallery’s founder, Suzanne Camarata. Suzanne, who will be returning to Texas to help care for her parents, was greeted by a grateful crowd of friends who filled the gallery to overflowing with best wishes – and occasionally teary smiles.

A fitting tribute for a remarkable woman who has been a Flat Rock fixture for the past decade.

Every day of the year, hundreds of visitors to The Park at Flat Rock enjoy walking and jogging on the 4-plus miles of trails that wind through the Park's beautiful landscape. Along those trails are over 40 benches - each inscribed with a plaque honoring a person, family members, an organization, pets, and even the intention of the benefactor who sponsored the bench.

Although passersby only occasionally stop to consider the inscriptions, each of those plaques hints at a deeper story. They are opening lines to stories of love, of loss, of happy memories, and all the things that stir the human soul.

In 2018, Mickey Mahaffey suffered a heart attack in one of the most remote parts of Mexico. Fortunately for him, he was in the company of an indigenous people known for their incredible feats of endurance. Hours away from the nearest medical facility and with no vehicles of their own, Mickey's friends turned to their physical prowess to save his life.

This is the story of Mickey's miraculous rescue and his efforts to assist the people who saved his life.

Daniel Hopkins was taking a break from a work project on his computer when he opened LoopNet.com - a site like Zillow but for commercial property. He entered parameters for a specific type of building within a specified price range and pressed the search button. A few moments later, there appeared a striking two-story brick building at the top of the listings for available properties in the Asheville area.

“My jaw just dropped,” Daniel recalls. “I grabbed the laptop and ran downstairs to show Melanie.”

In the heart of East Flat Rock stands a two-story brick building that has been at the center of the small community’s business and civic life for over 115 years. Referred to by many long-time residents of East Flat Rock as the Stepp Walker building, the large structure with a long history had, in recent years, fallen into disrepair.  For much of the previous decade, local residents and passersby on West Blue Ridge wondered what the fate of the historic building would ultimately be.

In 1858, Flat Rock resident Marti Vazquez Hutson’s great-grandfather sailed into Cuba’s Havana Harbor. Greeting him was the sight of the Morro Castle at the entrance to the harbor. Almost exactly one century later in 1959, as Marti and her family fled the Castro regime in Cuba, that same castle would be her last view of the country of her birth.

When Caroline Long Tindall’s son Liam was born in 2000, it was the culmination of many difficult years of trying to start a family. Holding her newborn son, she imagined her life ahead as a prototypical mother and wife with the challenges, rewards, and unexpected circumstances that accompany parenthood. 

Caroline had no way of knowing, however, that she was embarking on a path rife with challenges she could never have imagined - or even more surprising – that she would have the strength and conviction to create an organization that would provide help and hope to both her new son and hundreds of local families facing similar challenges.

Flat Rock Together recently had the opportunity to sit down for an interview with one of Flat Rock’s best-known residents, Squirt the Cat. Squirt has been a fixture along Rainbow Row in Flat Rock for several years and has accumulated legions of fans from near and far. Along the way, he’s learned a few things about people, life, and good barbecue.

Spend just a few moments with Jody and Jeff Rutter and you will know why they are so well suited to their chosen career in the hospitality industry. The owners of At Your Service, an Event Planning and Management company in Henderson County, are engaging, affable, and clearly the kind of people you would want to trust with details of your special day.

In short, Jeff and Jody are two of the most hospitable people you are likely to ever meet.

Throughout any reading of Flat Rock history, one name comes up repeatedly as having had a literal hand in the creation of the nascent mountain community which served as a summer refuge for many of Charleston’s most prominent citizens. Although, historians have tended to reserve the lion’s share of their accounts of Flat Rock’s earliest history for families with the familiar names of King, Baring, Memminger and Lowndes, a young Charleston boy orphaned at age 11 also found his way to Flat Rock and over time and with great energy and skill built a legacy that can still be seen throughout Flat Rock today.

His name was Henry Tudor “Squire” Farmer.

In March 2010, Anna Wesley Huneycutt died from a drug overdose. It was the culmination of a tumultuous struggle with addiction that upended her young life and the life of the family that loved her fiercely.

Anna’s death at age 20, however, was not the end of her story. In many ways, the tragic ending of her life was arguably the beginning of Anna’s legacy manifested during her short stay in this world.

Robert Cuthbert’s anthology of early private correspondence from Flat Rock provides a fascinating glimpse into the lives of early 19th-century men and women who sought to escape the oppressive heat and disease that marked Lowcountry summers in and around Charleston, South Carolina.  Many of them, in their quest for reprieve, found their way to a growing settlement known as Flat Rock in the mountains of western North Carolina.

With his trombone in the attic and his music career a distant memory, it seemed very unlikely that Jerry Zink would one day find himself as the leader of a swing band in the mountains of North Carolina. But three decades after he last played and nearly a thousand miles from his Oklahoma home, Jerry Zink retrieved his trombone from his attic in Flat Rock and resolved to re-learn the instrument that had given him – and his audiences – so much pleasure in his youth.  (Caricature by Pete Adams)