Mortimer

The story

Mortimer was built in 1904 when the Ritter Lumber Company bought the land along Wilson Creek to house its mill workers. At its peak roughly 800 people lived there, with a company store, a hotel, a school, a church, a movie theater, and a blacksmith — a busy mill town deep in what is now the Pisgah National Forest.

Wilson Creek undid it in two blows. In 1916 a fire on the ridges was followed by a catastrophic flood — the worst in Caldwell County's history — that wrecked the logging railroad and the dam and drove the lumber company out within a year. A cotton mill revived the town in the 1920s, and a Civilian Conservation Corps camp repaired much of the damage in the 1930s. Then in August 1940 a coastal hurricane pushed Wilson Creek over its banks again, and this second flood, only twenty-four years after the first, finally emptied the valley.

Today Mortimer is a quiet cluster of ruins and foundations along the creek — the shell of the old company store, remnants of the hotel and boarding houses, and CCC-era structures — beside a Forest Service campground popular with anglers and paddlers.

What remains today

The company-store ruin, hotel and boarding-house foundations, and CCC-era structures along Wilson Creek, near the Mortimer Recreation Area.