Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Photo above: Children of Maldonia and John Fullwood with friends, circa 1919. (Photo courtesy of Allen W. Fullwood)
Please welcome guest author Valaida Fullwood. Fullwood, a Charlotte, NC-based writer and public speaker, is the award-winning author of Giving Back: A Tribute to Generations of African American Philanthropists, and creator of The Soul of Philanthropy exhibit. A self-described “idea whisperer,” Valaida shares her myriad thoughts and experiences on social media and at valaida.com.
During slavery and into freedom, Riley Rufus McGimpsey breathed the air, worked the soil, and gazed the verdant splendor of Fonta Flora. Then around 1916 Western Carolina Power Company, a subsidiary of Southern Power, flooded it. The heart of Fonta Flora, the Appalachian farming community Riley and his kin had called home for a century, was in effect washed away by the waters of new, man-made Lake James. Nevertheless, what survives a century later is an enduring familial bond to a place that once was.
Riley, my paternal great-great grandfather, was born in 1845 in Fonta Flora, which was also known for a time as Linville. This fertile vale in the expansive Linville River region of western North Carolina, between Morganton and Marion, marks the epicenter of my McGimpsey-Fullwood family circle.
Growing up in Morganton, I would often hear my grandmother and her siblings recount stories of a seeming paradise where they, their parents and grandparents, and our ancestors used to live. For the longest time, the evocative and lyrical Fonta Flora has fed my imagination and stirred a quiet longing for what was lost.
Obscured by time, Fonta Flora was a name I had only heard uttered by family. That all changed eight years ago when Fonta Flora Brewery debuted in downtown Morganton and became a sensation. Surprising to me, the local brewers knew of the old farming settlement and were inspired by the legend of a “lost mountain utopia” where people say, “the races lived in harmony” until the lake disrupted it all.
The namesake brewery’s popularity and recent expansion to multiple locations has piqued public fascination, dredging memories, mysteries and myths up from the lake and pumping life anew into Fonta Flora. This revival, more than 100 years after the creation of Lake James, has re-animated my desire to know more. I am far from alone in my curiosity. Consequently, new opportunities have come from surprising places to share family lore and to dive deeper into what an Our State magazine article called an “Appalachian Atlantis.”
The origin of the community’s distinctive Latin-rooted name (which translates roughly as ”spring flowers” or “source of the blossoms”) has long been debated. However, the mere location of Fonta Flora—sprawling the river’s edge near lush Linville Gorge in stunning sight of Shortoff Mountain and with panoramic views of Table Rock, Hawksbill and Linville mountains—would seem to explain a lot.
Christian V. Moore, whose people were also a part of the tightknit Fonta Flora community of African American, white, and mixed-race families, became Riley’s wife. Christian and Riley married in 1871, a mere six years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The young couple eked out a living as sharecroppers on Fonta Flora’s fertile bottomland and began a family that would grow to include ten children.
Riley, in the ensuing years, became known for enterprising ways and a generosity of spirit that helped the family rise and achieve solid standing in the community. By the turn of the 20th century, Riley had become manager of a large farm in the valley, owned 56 acres beyond Fonta Flora, helped found Shiloh AME Church, financed and supported a local school for “colored children,” and earned respect as a reliable, go-to community member.
The McGimpseys’ fifth child, Mary Maldonia, would become my great grandmother. In 1904, she married John Wesley Fullwood from a neighboring family, becoming yet another pair to conjoin two families with deep roots in the valley. Like generations before, Maldonia and John set up household in Fonta Flora and began to sprout their own family branch. The Fullwoods settled near Paddy’s Creek, close to Whippoorwill Dairy Farm where today Fonta Flora Brewery has a new tasting room at Lake James.
By 1913, word of the impending dam and displacements had spread. With progress encroaching, Christian and Riley, now in their 60s, uprooted their lives and moved from Fonta Flora. Maldonia and John and their young brood eventually relocated, too. While the couples left the river valley, they each remained in Burke County, resettling in what was then called Quaker Meadows Township about 12 miles from old Fonta Flora.
Years after the lake, my great-great grands passed on—Christian in 1922 at age 68 and Riley in 1934 at 90. Decades later, when my father Allen was a child, his widowed grandmother Maldonia would often insist on returning to the lake. Daytrips to Lake James and what remained of the place of her youth were like pilgrimages. And so too it would be with her seed.
Maldonia and John’s son Riley Fullwood, his grandfather’s namesake, left Fonta Flora as a boy, yet in his twilight years would regale the next generation with stories of the lost Eden of his childhood. Climbing up and camping atop Shortoff, a towering feature over the valley then and now, was one of Uncle Riley’s favorite memories, recalls my dad.
Decades later during my own childhood, after-church Sunday drives around Lake James were ritual. These almost always included Daddy or a family elder pointing out old spots, recalling stories of Fonta Flora and lamenting the community drowned by the lake. Sometimes the specifics of their reminiscences had faded, yet the remembrance was clear. I hung on their every word, mesmerized.
Like a descendant of exiles, I inherited a nostalgic yearning and inextricable ties to a time and place I will never see. Bequeathed and probably cellular too, my hand-me-down memories of Fonta Flora are treasures.
The family’s old stomping grounds—the ridges and high hills of the valley that were never flooded—are where my dad returns to hunt bear every season. Growing up, my generation of cousins and I relished wildflower walks near Lake James, hikes down Linville Gorge, and treks around the region’s mountains. Summertime high points were family picnics by the cool, rocky waters of Linville River, I imagine much like our ancestors centuries before.
The power company may have dammed the river, but it failed to stop the stream of Fonta Flora stories, traditions, heritage and pride that still runs through the McGimpsey-Fullwood clan.
For more about Fonta Flora, read Glimpses of Fonta Flora, a book by Helen Norman and Patricia Page.
More articles on communities flooded by power dams:
Claytor Lake: what’s in a name?(Opens in a new browser tab)
Amy Greene’s new novel “Long Man” set to release February 25(Opens in a new browser tab)
Duke Power floods the Uplands of SC(Opens in a new browser tab)
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