Where are its boundaries? Four miles from downtown Hendersonville, most tourists pass it, without knowing it is there at all. Yet it is a community which has a unique attraction, a very special feeling. Concealed behind unmarked gateways, ornamental shrubbery and tree-lined carriage drives is one of the most interesting collections of dwellings in America.

A century and a half ago, Flat Rock began to be built up in large summer estates, after the English manner, by affluent Charlestonians, Europeans and prominent plantation owners of the low country. The first great house was Mountain Lodge, built in 1827 on a 3000 acre estate by Charles Baring, a member of Baring Brothers Banking Firm of London. The private chapel of the Mountain Lodge is now the Episcopal Church of St. John in the Wilderness.

With Mr. Baring came Judge Mitchell King of Charleston, owner of Argyle, the second great house of the area. He donated the land upon which Hendersonville was built, and directed the laying out of Main Street. Two of his children Dr. Mitchell King and Margaret King Huger built Kenmure and Tall Trees, respectively. These two places were originally part of Argyle, and are located just across the road from it now.

Other coastal families followed them, until the settlement grew to about fifty estates. Summers there became a round of Southern gaiety in antebellum days. Morning gatherings on latticed porches, picnics, tennis teas, quadrilles danced under candled chandeliers-the essence of pleasant living, attracting many of the leading men of the era: families of four signers of Declaration of Independence, the President of the Third Continental Congress, Revolutionary War Generals and later, Generals of the War between the States. Christopher Memminger and George Trenholm, both Secretaries of the Treasury of the Confederacy owned houses in Flat Rock; so did the grandson of General Thomas Pinckney (George Washington's ambassador to the Court of St. James), also the Count de Choiseul, French Consul at Charleston, Edmund Molyneaux, British Consul at Savannah, and many others whose names have made history.

Most of these old dwellings still stand, surrounded by wide lawns, gardens and towering trees - the product of generations of loving care. A few of these places remain in the possession of the families of the original owners, and more recent owners of others are still enjoying their charm and enhancing their beauty.

This is Flat Rock. It is the 20th Century seen against a backdrop of a distinguished past, a period when Southern leaders still had leisure for "gracious living". Some of the beauty created then still remains. It has an aura. Historic Flat Rock is trying to preserve what is left. The whole district is included in the National Register of Historic Places. Flat Rock is also home to the Flat Rock Playhouse, State Theater of North Carolina. It is recognized as one of the ten best summer stock theater companies in the United States. Such notables as Lee Marvin, Kim Hunter, Pat Hingle, and Burt Reynolds have "trod the boards" at Flat Rock. Established in 1952, it mounts an average of eight Broadway and London hits each summer. Across the street from the Flat Rock Playhouse, is Carl Sandburg's Connemara home, also open to the public.