Because
CreekSide is and will remain our home, we are committed to overseeing every
aspect of the development process. Our careful attention to detail will ensure that
the fifty mountain acres will retain their unique natural beauty for many generations to
come.
Please come to see us at Creek Side. If you're anything like we
are, you may end up staying a while!
CreekSide is
conveniently located on Haywood Road (N.C. Highway 191) just minutes from downtown
Hendersonville. Interstate 26, area hospitals and schools, and the Asheville
Regional Airport are all easily accessible from the property.
Driving Directions
From Asheville:
Interstate 26 East to Exit 9 (Highway 280). Turn right and travel 5 miles.
Turn left onto Highway 191/Haywood Road. Travel 5.1 miles. CreekSide
is on the right.
From Spartanburg: Interstate 26 West to
Exit 18B (Highway 64 West). Travel 2.1 miles and turn right onto Highway 25
North. Travel 0.7 miles and turn left onto Highway 191/Haywood Road. Travel
2.4 miles. CreekSide is on the left
MOUNTAIN
BUILDING
32 Mistletoe Trail
Hendersonville, N.C. 28791
Development of the
Bowen farm on N.C. 191 as the CreekSide residential community brings to light some of
Henderson County's early history.
The present owners of the property are three great-great-granddaughters of Nelson
Bowen, the second pastor of Hendersonville's First Baptist Church and publisher of one of
the first newspapers in the county.
The owners are Doris Galloway, Mary Small and Patsy Pryor. Small and Pryor
have homes in the new 52-acre community. Galloway lives in Flat Rock.
When they decided to develop the farm, they adopted a plan to
retain the natural beauty of the headwaters of Brittain Creek and much of the forested
area surrounding the development. They established rights of way for hiking trails
and deeded 17 acres for a permanent woodland.
Mary Small's husband, Maxie, a developer of several communities along the East Coast, is
in charge of the project. His company is Mountain Building and Development, which
has an office near the entrance of the development.
"Most of the homes will have a European look, but individual architects will be given
considerable freedom," the developer said. It is expected to take four years to
complete the planned 71 homes.
CreekSide is on N.C. 191, a little more than two miles west of the intersection with U.S.
25 North.
When Bowen bought the property in 1846, it was bound on the east by Blythe Street, on the
west by Rugby Road, on the north by the road that became N.C. 191 and on the south by the
ridge of Long John Mountain. Bowen bought it at a foreclosure sale for $947 in gold,
according to family records.
He came to Hendersonville from Tennessee at the invitation of the Rev. James Blythe, first
pastor of the recently formed First Baptist Church. The pastor recruited Bowen to
publish the Carolina Baptist, a newspaper Blythe had started to inform people about church
activities and Christian history.
Although reared a Methodist and educated at a Presbyterian college, Bowen accepted the
job. He was ordained a Baptist minister after moving to Hendersonville. The
name of the newspaper changed from the Carolina Baptist to the Baptist Telescope to the
Cottage Visitor during the next few years.
The front page of the third issue of The Cottage Visitor is framed in the CreekSide
office. the masthead says the paper is "Published every Monday by Bowen three
miles N.W. of Hendersonville, N.C."
A year's subscription cost $1.50; six month, 75 cents. No single-issue price was
given.
"Advertisements compatable (now compatible) with the character of the paper will be
inserted at ten cents per line for the first insertion and 5 cents per line for each
subsequent insertions," the paper declared.
Much of the page was a report "from Bowen's Travels in Central Africa" and
included such subjects as "Social Life in Yoruba, Jerusalem, and Haman, of the Misery
of Pride."
According to Sadie Patterson's The Story of Henderson County, the Carolina
Baptist was started in 1853 and The Cottage Visitor was started in 1867. She had no
date for the Baptist Telescope.
Patterson wrote that a church publication, the Blue Ridge Baptist, followed the Cottage
Visitor. It was published by W.A.G. Brown in a log building on Washington Street,
the author wrote, but she didn't give a date for its publication.
The Hendersonville Times, a forerunner of the Times-News, was started during the Civil War
by Samuel Brittain, Patterson reported. This was a newspaper with coverage of
general community news.
Bowen was the father of 12 children. Many of them helped set hand type by
candlelight for The Cottage Visitor, according to the First Baptist Church history, A
Century of Progress.
The same book reports the Bowen family first lived on the south end of Main Street,
then at their farm and finally in a house that stood on the present location of the Cedars
in downtown Hendersonville. Some of the trees in the lawn of that property were
planted by the Bowens.
A granddaughter of the pastor, Jennie Bowen, bought the Ames Hotel at the corner of Church
Street and Fourth Avenue and changed its name to the Bowen Hotel. It had 35 rooms
and 17 baths, with retail shop spaces outside the first-floor lobby.
The first studios of radio station WHKP-AM 1450 were in the hotel. The property is
now a parking lot.
Besides his pastorate at the Hendersonville Church, nelson Bowen was also pastor, for
short periods, of the First Baptist Church in Asheville and the French Broad Church in
Mills River.
He was the first president of Judson College, a Hendersonville institution for the
education of females. Construction started on the main building in 1859 but was
halted two years later by the Civil War. Work did not resume until 1872, after the
Baptist Association had sold it to a private group. Bowen also helped organize
Carson-Newman Collage in Jefferson City, Tenn.
The Century of Progress wrote as follows of the pastor's interest in
education, especially the education of blacks in the community:
"When the white and the colored people of our church separated, he went with the
colored people to East Flat Rock to preach to them, for in his own words, they needed him
more than the white people."
