Black Mountain College

I just got back from a family vacation in Boone, North Carolina. While there I took the two hour drive down the Blue Ridge Parkway to the site of Black Mountain College. The site is now how to Camp Rockmont, a Christian summer camp for boys. Despite all my reading about the College and viewing hundreds of pictures of that time and place, I was unprepared for just how beautiful the campus is. I think this is because the period I am most interested in is the period of the school's decline: the rough and harrowing years of the early and mid 1950s. Eden gone malignant and insane. But seeing it on a sunshine filled day in late July really brought home to me why Black Mountain College could attract such creative talent despite its obvious financial and material shortcomings. The campus was truly God's Country even before Camp Rockmont took over. Before you reach the College there is a prison, which I am sure I read about but it never registered until I actually passed it. Prison/College/Religous Retreat. A dissertation could be written on the use and meaning of the space along Lake Eden Road.

JB

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