Flat Top Manor: The Denim King's Mountain Kingdom
Near Banner Elk, North Carolina
The white manor house perched above Blowing Rock was built by a man who clothed America. Moses Cone was born in eighteen fifty-seven to German immigrant parents in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and he grew up to transform the textile economy of the South. With his brother Caesar, he launched a fabric marketing business in eighteen ninety-one, then opened their own mill in Greensboro in eighteen ninety-five. By nineteen oh two, their White Oak Mill was the largest denim manufacturer in the world. Levi Strauss came to them for fabric. Moses Cone was, plainly, the Denim King.
In the late eighteen nineties he began assembling land in the Blue Ridge high country above Blowing Rock, ultimately piecing together thirty-six hundred acres. Construction on Flat Top Manor began in eighteen ninety-nine and was finished in nineteen oh one, a twenty-three-room Colonial Revival mansion of gleaming white weatherboard that looked, from the valley below, like a cloud resting on the ridge.
Cone did not merely build a house. He built an estate in the English tradition: twenty-five miles of carriage roads laid out for afternoon drives, two man-made lakes stocked with bass and trout, a ten-thousand-tree apple orchard, and extensive plantings of white pine and hemlock across slopes that loggers had stripped bare. He opened the grounds to the local community every day from eight to six, charging nothing but asking that no one hunt or pick the flowers.
He was an early voice for what would become the Pisgah National Forest, advocating to Congress for an Appalachian forest reserve that would protect these mountains from further clear-cutting.
Moses Cone died in nineteen oh eight, before he could see that cause succeed. His wife Bertha held the estate for thirty-nine more years, until her own death in nineteen forty-seven. The property then passed briefly to Cone Memorial Hospital in Greensboro, which donated it to the National Park Service. Today the house sits at milepost two-ninety-four of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and the Southern Highland Craft Guild operates a gallery inside Flat Top Manor, a Gilded Age mansion that now sells mountain quilts and hand-thrown pottery to passing travelers.
