High Hampton Resort

The Hotel

High Hampton's land has a long history before its modern hotel life. The 1,400-acre property at the foot of Rock Mountain, on the western flank of Cashiers, was the summer retreat of the Hampton family of South Carolina (the senatorial Hamptons of Wade Hampton fame) through the second half of the nineteenth century, the land sat at four thousand feet of elevation, the climate ran ten degrees cooler than Charleston or Columbia in August, and the Lake Hampton on the property provided the swimming-and-boating recreation that low-country families travelled north to find. In 1922 the Hampton family sold the property to William and Carrie Halsted McKee, who opened a twenty-five-room inn for the 1924 summer season and ran the property as a country-house hotel until the late 1990s.

The current main inn dates to 1933, the chestnut-bark Adirondack-style structure that replaced the original 1922 building when the property reached the volume that justified a purpose-built lodge. The architecture is the proper Adirondack: chestnut bark over timber framing, deep overhanging eaves, multiple stone fireplaces, the long covered veranda that defines the property's east elevation, all built when the American chestnut was still available as a building material and now effectively impossible to reproduce. The inn was added to over the following decades with detached cottages distributed through the grounds, and at the resort's peak through the 1950s and 1960s it was hosting the Vanderbilts, Margaret Truman, and the South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida summer establishment in a programme that essentially ran itself.

By 2017 the resort had run down badly, the Adirondack envelope was failing, the kitchens and service rooms were a half-century behind contemporary expectations, and the property was up for sale. The buyer was a partnership including Sandy Beall, the founder of Blackberry Farm in Tennessee and the most decorated Southern resort operator of his generation. Beall closed the resort, spent four years rebuilding it from the foundations up while preserving the original chestnut-bark envelope intact, and reopened in summer 2021 as High Hampton Resort, the original property name, the original spirit, the original 116-room count, and an entirely contemporary operational standard. The result is the South's most considered mountain resort, the only direct philosophical descendant of Blackberry Farm anywhere in the Carolinas, and Cashiers's single anchor property.

There are 116 rooms across the main inn and the cottages, each individually configured (no two cottages are alike, the main-inn rooms vary by floor plate), every room with the antique furnishings, the hand-hewn beams, ceiling fans, mountain or lake views, and the absence of televisions that the Beall philosophy specifies. The property has the historic 18-hole George W. Cobb golf course (the only course in the immediate Cashiers area), a working farm and farm-to-table dining programme, six clay tennis courts, the historic Lake Hampton with boats and swimming, a five-acre fly-fishing pond, twenty-two miles of hiking trails, a serious spa with mountain-water hydrotherapy programmes, the 1,400 acres of property, and the rare programme of mountain horseback riding and falconry that Beall's operations are known for. The cumulative result is the closest experience the South offers to the Aman or Six Senses programme, in a 1933 building, four thousand feet up.

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