A Year-Round Guide to Franklin and Nantahala

Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of six Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their

Rosemary and Goat Cheese Strata

Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of six Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their

Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of six Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their column aloud, allowing each distinct voice to shine. Click below to listen to Brad read his column aloud. 


A fitful rain falls in the forest, plump droplets echoing like scattered applause as they strike the leaves. Along a well-worn trail that shadows the state line between North and South Carolina near Flat Rock, Ronnie Pepper Sr. leans a hand against a tree and surveys the scene. It was here that a group of formerly enslaved people, newly freed, created their own experiment in communal living. They named it “the Kingdom of the Happy Land.”

Pepper is many things — teacher, librarian, volunteer, community leader — but he has always been a storyteller. And the story of Happy Land has long intrigued him.

“I was born and raised here,” he says. “You hear tidbits, but it wasn’t until we organized a group of locals that wanted to do something to celebrate our history that we realized there’s got to be more to this story.”

The generally accepted narrative goes like this: Shortly after the Civil War ended in 1865, freedmen and -women traveled north from Mississippi in search of a better life, picking up additional followers along the way. They ascended the “Winding Stairs” near the border of the Carolinas, arriving at a former plantation hollowed out by war and neglect. They stopped and offered help to the widow who owned the place that her late husband had named Oakland. And they decided to stay, creating a community modeled on African traditions that they had learned about from their ancestors.

For several decades, the kingdom thrived through shared labor and an “all for one, one for all” ethos.

At the time, the federal government was working to integrate millions of freedmen through Reconstruction, which included the passage of constitutional amendments enshrining their rights as citizens and establishing safeguards for those rights. Yet these wanderers chose a social and cultural hierarchy that was less about assimilation than it was about creating a strong, unified, and self-supporting community.

For several decades, the kingdom thrived. Through shared labor and an “all for one, one for all” ethos, residents purchased 210 acres at a little less than $1 an acre from the family of Serepta Merritt Davis, widow of the plantation owner, Col. John Davis. They built a self-sufficient community, raising their own crops and educating their children.

Some may have found work as teamsters on the Buncombe Turnpike. Some found jobs at local inns. Some likely worked on the construction of the new railroad being built up the Saluda Grade or in the newly established zircon mines. And some created and sold medicinal cures, most notably Happy Land Liniment, a popular remedy made from plants and herbs.

This is the narrative shared by historian Sadie Smathers Patton in her 1957 book, The Kingdom of the Happy Land. In the years since, dozens of other stories have been written about Happy Land, using Patton’s version of events as the primary source. And while aspects of her account are true — based on the recollections of descendants of the settlers — new research is helping provide a fuller understanding of this momentous but short-lived cooperative community.

• • •

In 2010, Suzanne Hale retired from her career as a foreign service officer with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and moved to Hendersonville, where she heard Pepper recount the story of Happy Land. In his telling, Pepper mused about where in Mississippi the settlers might have come from. Hale was intrigued. She’d acquired useful research skills while looking into her own family’s genealogy, and she told Pepper she’d be glad to help find out. She researched all the families listed in Patton’s account and was amazed at how much information was out there.

As a result, the original Happy Land narrative has changed in dramatic ways. For example, the odyssey from Mississippi likely didn’t happen for most of the group. “There’s no basis in fact for it. All but one of them came from Cross Anchor,” Hale says, referring to a community near Spartanburg, South Carolina. She also believes the timeline of the kingdom is different from what Patton posited: “I think most of the people arrived in the 1870s.”

Suzanne Hale and Ronnie Pepper Sr.

Together, Suzanne Hale (left) and Ronnie Pepper Sr. have researched the Kingdom of the Happy Land, providing a clearer picture of the one-time community in Henderson County. photograph by Tim Robison

This version of events places the founding of Happy Land during a period of racial violence in the South and the beginning of the Jim Crow era, suggesting that the settlers were motivated not by the promise of Reconstruction but rather by the violence and oppressive laws and practices put in place by Southern states in response to emancipation.

At that time, there was a lot of Klan violence against African Americans, especially related to voting. A series of savage attacks across the South spurred a congressional hearing that resulted in hundreds of pages of testimony by victims. “These people were so gutsy and brave to go in and share their experiences,” Hale says. More than 200 freedmen and Union sympathizers were whipped or attacked by Klansmen in Spartanburg County alone.

It makes sense that a group of persecuted individuals would create a refuge set apart from the society that endangered their lives and limited their opportunities. What the residents of Happy Land embraced was a different way of life structured around a trusted leader.

Illustration of the Kingdom of the Happy Land

Some accounts say the first sovereign was William Montgomery, who ruled alongside his wife, Luella. William either died or left the kingdom, and his brother, Robert, took on the royal duties. Residents contributed their efforts in a communal system, paying into a central treasury under the Montgomerys’ leadership. Patton’s book cites two deed transactions in 1882 that support the Montgomerys’ primacy, with about 75 acres in Luella’s name on the South Carolina side of the state line and around 130 acres in Robert’s name on the North Carolina side.

The name the members selected for their “promised land” wasn’t just a pleasant idea: It was an aspiration. Here, somehow, they would create the peace, harmony, and self-determination they sought.

• • •

At home in Washington, D.C., novelist Dolen Perkins-Valdez heard about the kingdom entirely by chance. During the pandemic, she took up the banjo and became enamored with North Carolina players. While looking up banjo music online, she stumbled upon the Happy Land story. One name kept popping up: Ronnie Pepper.

Before long, she found herself in Hendersonville, having dinner with Pepper and Hale. “Over the next year or so, the three of us worked on figuring out what actually happened,” Perkins-Valdez says. “Suzanne did a lot of the legwork — digging into census records — and Ronnie was our voice of wisdom and kept us on track.”

The revelation uncovered by Hale about Cross Anchor represented a big breakthrough to Perkins-Valdez. She traveled to the “four-way-stop kind of town” and got a feel for where the Happy Land residents were from. She visited cemeteries and consulted newspaper archives. With this insight, a novel began to take shape.

“They were fleeing violence,” Perkins-Valdez says. “They had already started over once. But they couldn’t live their lives without being terrorized. They came up seeking peace.”

Dolen Perkins-Valdez and her novel Happy Land

Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s latest novel, Happy Land — based in part on new research about the kingdom — will be published by Penguin Random House in April. photograph by Norman E. Jones Photography; Book cover courtesy of Penguin Random House

For Perkins-Valdez, the idea of land ownership by Black people during Reconstruction and the beginning of Jim Crow was a momentous achievement. “It still feels epic — what land ownership meant to Black people in those days. They were really connected and rooted in the land.”

When Pepper visits the place where the kingdom once flourished, he senses that connection. As he looks out over what was once a prospering community of farm and field, he imagines the sights and sounds and smells. “I can see the activity that was going on. It was rough work. I know my people. They’d start humming and singing when the work was getting tough. And then it would get quiet, and you could smell the smoke from the fires.”

Ironically, the seeds of Happy Land’s demise may have been planted along with the very railroad that some of them worked to complete. Once trains began running on the new tracks, commerce on the Buncombe Turnpike fell off, and waystations like Serepta Davis’s inn began to close. Slowly, as the years went by, members of the kingdom drifted away to find work in other places. Nature reclaimed the pastures and fields they had created and tended, leaving little evidence of the sanctuary they nurtured for three decades.


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Pepper is proud of the work that he, Hale, Perkins-Valdez, and other volunteers have done to create a more accurate portrait of the Kingdom of the Happy Land. He believes it’s important to share the story with younger generations, to inspire them with the example set by a group of enterprising Black people. But he knows there’s more to be done. “My goal is to encourage others to continue to look for bits and pieces of the story and continue to add to it.”

He likens their efforts to building a fire. “If you don’t continue putting fuel on it, the fire dies out. But the coals are still there, and if someone comes along and picks up a stick and stirs it around, it builds up again. So I’m hoping it never goes out.”

Together, Pepper, Hale, and Perkins-Valdez have stirred the fire, illuminating the journey of a small band of men and women who started with nothing and conjured up a kingdom.

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This story was published on Jan 15, 2025

Brad Campbell

Brad Campbell is an award-winning creative director, a feature writer, and the winner of multiple Moth StorySLAM competitions.