"Fleetwood Hotel under construction, Hendersonville, N.C., June 11, 192?." (P642 & 547), Jody Barber Photographic Collection, D.H. Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville 28804

Jody Barber, Sr. describes the hotel in an interview with Dr. Bruce Greenawalt, in 1978. [See Jody Barber, Sr. Oral History]:

BG:    Interview in Hendersonville, NC in the shop of Jody Barber, photographer.

BG:    Here we're talking about print 642. And, uh ...what on earth is happening here

JB:    A very wealthy man named J. Perry Stoltz...

BG:    How do you spell that name? [no response to question]

JB:   [Stoltz] ... from Florida, had a lot of money and he and some more folks got together and thought they would build a 14 story hotel up on top of the mountain and the boom collapsed before they could finish it,  but they got along as far as this. And, from this top floor which was to be up here, you could see two-hundred miles down into South Carolina and Georgia. Down in there.  It was quite a grand scheme and could have been  a wonderful thing if it hadn't been for the times when it was started, see.

BG:    When was it begun?

JB:    Well I better tell you right away the dates are left out of my memory.  I'm sorry they're all in that book of  Frank FitzSimons' [FitzSimons, Frank L. From the banks of the Oklawaha / by Frank L. FitzSimons ; drawings by Adèle Kershaw Thornton. [Hendersonville, N.C.] : Golden Glow Pub. Co., 1976-1979] You can easily get the dates from that. But I am terribly handicapped by not remembering many of the details. I'm remember all about it, going up there, taking pictures . I remember going when that floor was just laid, a rough floor up there, no, there wasn't a floor. There was nothing but  2 x 12's laid across the steel girders there, steel  what do you call it, the things that go flat.  Anyway there wasn't anything to walk on except these 2 x 12 planks, or timbers, laid out there and I had to go up on that and the wind was blowing to beat the devil..... and I had to up there and I didn't try to put my camera on a tripod. There wasn't anything to put the tripod on.  So all I could do was to lay it down on those 2 x 12 , and to lie down on my stomach and take the picture from there. It was quite an interesting experience because its a wonder I got a picture at all. That I didn't get blown off of there, because the wind was blowing terrifically but I got a good picture from that top floor of that thing. That was the last of that. They built this thing far enough along 'til they had all the bathtubs out in the yard They said there was $10,000 dollars worth of bathtubs parked out in the lot and the people who had sold them didn't want to come and get them because they wanted to get the money and the people who had contracted to buy them didn't have the money to pay for them. So, they just sat there. And, people began stealing them. And those bathtubs, a lot of them disappeared. But, also they were far enough along 'til they had the heating, tremendous, uh, what do you call them, the furnaces, or what they were. Anyhow, they had seven trucks to get 'em up the  mountain. They had two white trucks hooked together. The biggest trucks they had in those days, hooked together. And these tremendous things were stretched from one truck to the other...and  then they had two trucks in front and three behind.

BG:    These were the furnaces, the heating units?

JB:    Yes.

BG    ... that they were hauling up?

JB:    That's right. They were up there and installing and that's how far along they were. And its a shame it had to stop. You don't remember what happened, but I do. All four banks in town, yea,  closed in one day . You couldn't get a nickel. You couldn't get .25 cents for a meal. You just had to do the best you could. Everybody was down standing in front of the bank there looking at the door. And, nobody came to it. It wasn't open. None of the banks were open.. And that's this thing collapsed so. So it was completely stopped and ...

BG:    When was it torn down?

It stayed there for a year or more, two years or more, before it was started to be torn..., before they started to tear it down. Because they continued to hope that there might be some way of finishing it, see. Some of them hoped that somebody with some more capital would come in. But nobody had any capital in those days. If they did it was tied up If you had any money why you couldn't get it. So this came to nothing at all. But it  was a grand scheme, and a wonderfully, beautiful idea. 

BG:   Did the failure of this project depress the people in Hendersonville?

JB:    Did it what?

BG:   Did it depress or discourage the people here in Hendersonville?

BG:     Alright. Now I am looking at print number 643, which is an aerial view of Hendersonville. And is this the the hill that the hotel was built on? 

JB:     Yes. There it is, right there. You can see the building right there. Yes, sir. Now I don't know about that because I've never done any aerials. Jody may have done it himself. He would know about that. That's looking west. That's Jump-off Mountain over there. That is the hotel that failed. The Fleetwood Hotel.

BG:    What's on the hill now? Is there a subdivision?

JB:     A tremendous number of lots were sold. There are a good many  houses up there, on the way up, mostly. Not any of them up on the top of the hill, ... top of the mountain. But there's a good road. They had to build a good road to do it.  Because they had so much stuff to haul up there, you see. All that building material had to be hauled up there.  And they built a splendid road all the way  And its still there. That's alright. So, there are houses all through the woods up there.  Its a very nice subdivision. It's a very nice place to live... in the summertime. I wouldn't want to live there in the winter, because it's too hard to get up and down.