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By Josh Lanier

A few days ago, I ran across a New York Times article from back in 1993 titled “Developing a South Carolina Mountaintop.” The article discussed the progress being made on South Carolina’s first mountaintop golf community, The Cliffs at Glassy. I had just started my ninth-grade year when the article was published, and as I began to read, I experienced a few flashes of memory from my childhood growing up near the foot of the mountain. 

The Times article mentioned the developer, Jim Anthony, and his successes, as well as all the challenges he faced in the fight to secure the tracts of land needed to complete his vision for what stood as the heart of The Dark Corner. Anthony faced plenty of criticism from the Sierra Club, Trout Unlimited, and a number of locals. It seemed like everybody had an opinion, and there was a lot of discourse going around on both sides of the argument. But at the end of the day, Jimmy Anthony’s vision came to fruition. 

I still remember our family riding around on the dirt and gravel road up on Glassy, a few years before development on the mountain got started. Sunday afternoons would find us parked near the intersection of Highway 11 and SC 101 to watch the hang gliders come off Glassy Rock and land out in the field across the road from where we were parked. One such Sunday, a brave soul got a running start, caught a thermal, and lifted high into the azure sky, only to be snatched by some rogue wind current and carried over the back side of Glassy. We never saw them again that day, but we had our fingers crossed that the wind-borne soul landed safely somewhere over in Saluda or Hendersonville, or maybe Tuxedo. 

A bunch of the high school kids who could drive were always going up on Glassy and partying, or at least that’s what I’d heard. My mother was a school bus driver in those days, and whenever she would drive the mountain route to pick up the Plumley kids, she would drive the county’s yellow Suburban that was four-wheel-drive and would still go in the snow and mud. John Ansel Plumley would sometimes meet her on the old road and show her where to turn around so she didn’t run off the side of the mountain. By this point, the developer had begun working on a deal. 

About the same time, my dad was building a log house on our property in what would be considered the Highland community, just down the road. During that period, my dad cut a little pulpwood for extra money, and we made many a trip to local sawmills and to Arnold Emery’s Lumber Company for materials we needed for the house. Riding around with him on Saturdays, I got to know a lot of the people who lived in the shadow of the mountain, many of whose familial roots ran deep for at least 200 years in the community. Progress had come to Glassy Mountain, and even though I didn’t fully understand it then, I had witnessed a major change taking place in the culture of The Dark Corner. 

When I come to the intersection of Highway 101 and 11 nowadays, I always take time to stop and marvel at the front range of the mountains; Glassy Mountain remains the focal point of the image that, through the years, has become stitched into the fabric of who I am.