CONNELLY’S SPRINGS

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Where is Connelly’s Springs? For whom was it named'? When did the first settlers come?

It lies in eastern Burke County, east of Valdese and west of Icard on the south side of Highway 70.

In 1838 Captain William Lewis Connelly, Third Regiment N.C. Volunteer Militia in Burke County, was assigned to Cherokee to gather the Indians to be taken to a reservation in Oklahoma. When he and his seventy Burke troopers had completed the assignment, he returned to the Burke area and established a tavern and way station on the Salisbury-to-Morganton stagecoach line. The community grew, and when the railroad came along this line it became a railroad stop. This place later became known as Connelly’s Springs.

The first post office, established in 1857, was called Happy Home. It was discontinued in 1867 and re-established in 1869.

On October 2, 1886, the post office name was changed to Connelly’s Springs.

For years Mrs. William Connelly had washed her white clothes in water from the different springs and they became more and more yellowish. Finally, in 1885, she had the water of the springs tested in Raleigh, and the water was found to be high in mineral content including bicarbonate of iron which would be very beneficial in the cure of many diseases.

In the latter part of the l880’s, vacationing and ‘taking cures" at mineral springs areas was very popular. Because Connelly’s Springs was on the railroad, the summer visitors came by the hundreds.

The Connelly’s Spring Hotel, a hundred-room hotel located on a high bank beside the railroad, with a spacious dining room and a beautiful ballroom, became a widely known tourist-health center. Demijohns of mineral water were shipped to Chicago and even to London. The village grew into a nice railroad town. It had a water tank, coaling station, and a "y" where locomotives could turn around. When the railroad was completed to Asheville in the 1880’s, Connelly’s Springs was no longer ‘the end of the line." Eight passenger trains stopped each day to put off and receive mail and passengers and midday meals were served on the trains by the hotel.

In the early 1900’s Connelly’s Springs was twenty rooms, as well as several boarding houses. There were two churches: The First Baptist and Connelly’s Springs Methodist, both still active. There was a two-room school until Connelly’s Springs and Rutherford College’s schools were consolidated.

When the town was incorporated, the depot waiting room was a courtroom and many trials were heard there.

Some of the family names of this community were: Abee, Abernathy, Alexander, Aiken, Berry, Connelly, Coulter, Deal, Dean, Davis, Enniss, Goode, Hood, Hudson, McLain, McGailiard, Moose, Mingus, Page, Shook, Southerland, Stirewault, Sipe, Simpson, Set-zer, Young, and Zimmerman. The community was fortunate in having a doctor – Dr. Frank 0. Ford, son of a doctor from Catawba County, lived there.

I have some fond memories of the railroad from my fifty-nine years of living here. The only engineer on the Southern RR that could blow a whip-o-will call was E.O. Moose. My father, Jones Hudson, built a large two-story house with a porch half way around it facing the railroad. As a small boy on summer Sunday mornings, it was a pleasure to hear the cattle lowing and the chickens and ducks cackling and quacking. They seemed to be the Sunday travelers. The cattle and hogs were always in cars on the front of the train, so that the smoke coming from the engine would not smother them in the mountain tunnels. The chickens and the ducks were at the end of the train next to the caboose. In the fall the circus trains were on the move.

Trains were once a great asset to this area.

The telegraphers, freight agents, and ticket agents were very important people. Once live stock, lumber, shingles, and other building supplies were shipped out of here by the carloads. Butter and eggs also were shipped by train.
Fertilzer, furniture, dry goods, coal and many other things were shipped in. But no longer.

An interesting story about Connelly’s Springs has to do with Cornelius Vanderbilt. It seems that Vanderbilt who enjoyed the mountains of western North Carolina came down to Connelly’s Springs in his private railroad car. He stayed at the hotel where he saw and admired nearby Hoosier’s Knob. He tried to buy this mountain, but the owner refused to sell it. Later on, he went farther west and purchased a large tract of land near Asheville where he built the well-known Biltmore House. Had Vanderbilt been able to acquire Hooser’s Knob, Vanderbilt House might have been near Connelly’s Springs.

The one hundred-room hotel was torn down in the early 1940’s and the lumber from it moved to Winston-Salem where it was used to build a school. The twenty-room hotel was so dilapidated it was given to the firemen for fire-fighting practice.

Today, the population of Connelly’s Springs, within a mile radius, is probably seven hundred. Much of the village or business sections once faced the railroad, but now most of the business is gone and it is a residential section. The trains stop only to pass each other. Tourists no longer come, but Connelly’s Springs is a pleasant, friendly, place, and we have a good way of life.

(2) Conversations with the author's father and grandfather.

(3) Having lived in Connelly Springs since age five, and having been postmaster

there for a number of years.

(4) Having known many prominent citizens and heard about earlier important people of Connelly Springs

–Edmond Hudson