Every fall in the mid nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of hogs made their way from farms in Tennessee and Kentucky down the Buncombe Turnpike to market in South Carolina. The turnpike was created to blaze a safer route of transport for livestock through the treacherous and isolated Blue Ridge Mountains. The road ran parallel to the French Broad River, and created an opportunity for the slaveholding elite of Western North Carolina to profit from the traffic moving through their county. By 1835 many of Buncombe County’s most elite had moved their families, and their slaves, to homes along the new route to accommodate travelers like James Silk Buckingham, Esq., who observed that Buncombe County had been “esteemed the most healthy and beautiful portion of all the Southern country, which I can readily believe, from what I have seen of it.” He lamented that slaves were kept in sorry conditions, yet “the business of the inn is left mostly to black servants to manage as they see fit.” The system of slavery that Buckingham observed manifested itself in the second generation of Buncombe county’s elite who used slave labor to operate multifaceted inns and farms. These entrepreneurial farmers used their economic status and political power to transform what was once a society with slaves into a slave society.
