Henderson County |
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Henderson County was carved out of Buncombe County in 1838. Henderson was named in honor of Leonard Henderson, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina. Portions of Henderson County were annexed in 1844. Charleston, South Carolina was an important port on the Atlantic but citizens of that city saw the need for access to a larger shipping area and turned toward the developing area of the navigable waters of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. A map line from Charleston to Cincinnati crosses Western North Carolina and very early exploration sought to cross the mountain barrier. This effort resulted in the mingling of a pioneer and a more developed society and made Henderson County more cosmopolitan than similar pioneer communities. James Dyer Justice of the Justice family lineage is credited with the layout of Hendersonville, the county seat that is located 25 miles south of Asheville. Many within the Justice family served as Baptist ministers in Hendersonville and surrounding areas. Like other counties, the "first" roads were actually trails-most of them old Indian trails. A north-south line through the center of Henderson County was the most direct route from Asheville to Greenville. Henderson County shows every type of topography possible from river valleys, to flat lands, to rolling county to hill country. Henderson County has been carved and molded and shaped until it no longer even remotely resembles the land of its ancestors. In the early 1900s, the Agents of the "Speculation Land Company" engaged the services of George E. Ladshaw of Ladshaw & Ladshaw, Hydraulic Engineers, Spartanburg, South Carolina, for the purpose of determining the feasibility of developing hydroelectric power plants on the Green River in Henderson and Polk Counties. |
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0001 map |
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Bibliography: |
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James T. Fain, Jr.
A Partial History of Henderson County.
New York: Arno Press, 1980. Patton, Sadie Smathers. The Story of Henderson County. Asheville: Miller Printing Co., 1947. |