Higgins, North Carolina

Higgins is a populated place in Egypt township in Yancey County, North Carolina, USA.[1] Already in decline in the 1920s, it was revived by a Presbyterian missionary who obtained support from the Markle Foundation in the 1930s, but has since been largely abandoned. Under the name of "Henry", it was a case study in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, by Jane Jacobs, who spent six months there in 1934.

Location

Higgins is on the Cane River and Highway 19 West.[2] It is 12 miles from the county seat of Yancey County, Burnsville,[3] and its elevation is 2411[4] or 2390 feet.[5]

History

Higgins takes its name from the three brothers who founded it in the early 18th century. Descendants of the brothers continued to live there into the 1920s.[3] It was named for John Higgins.[5]

In 1922 Martha Robison, a worker for the Board of National Missions of the Presbyterian Church, arrived for a three-month stay to establish housing for a missionary and decided to live there permanently. In November 1929 she received a letter from her cousin, John Markle, a coal magnate, who offered her help. Markle and the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation provided funds for a building, completed in 1931, containing a community library, a meeting room, a clinic, and on the upper floor spaces for woodwork, weaving, and pottery. The local people sold crafts, honey, and molasses; Eleanor Roosevelt visited and made a purchase on July 3, 1934.[6] The Markle Building also temporarily housed the local school. It formed part of a group of masonry buildings including the Holland Memorial Church and Kirksedge Cottage.[7] The Markle Handicraft School was a member of the Southern Highland Craft Guild.[8]

The Markle Foundation was the major beneficiary of John Markle's will on his death in 1933, but later changed its focus and cut off funding to Higgins.[8]

Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, the urban activist and writer, was Robinson's niece and lived with her in Higgins for six months in 1934.[9] She later used Higgins, under the name "Henry", as an example in Cities and the Wealth of Nations,[10] analyzing its decline as the result of its being cut off by bad roads from cities, so that the people had been reduced to subsistence and over generations had forgotten the skills they once had, and even that such skills existed; for example, that a church could be built of stone.[11][12]

References

  1. ↑ "Higgins (in Yancey County, NC)", North Carolina Home Town Locator, retrieved April 28, 2017.
  2. ↑ Elaine McAlister Dellinger and Kiesa Kay, Yancey County, Images of America, Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia, 2011, ISBN 9780738587608, p. 2.
  3. 1 2 Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs, New York: Knopf, 2016, ISBN 9780307961907, p. 54].
  4. ↑ United States Geological Survey, Geographic Names Information System, ID 1020728, June 17, 1980.
  5. 1 2 "Higgins", William S. Powell and Michael Hill, The North Carolina Gazetteer: A Dictionary of Tar Heel Places and Their History, 2nd ed. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina, 2010, ISBN 9780807833995, p. 241.
  6. ↑ Kanigel, pp. 55–57.
  7. ↑ "History Association Meeting", Estatoee, XIII.2, Yancey History Association, May 1998, p. 1.
  8. 1 2 Carolyn Sakowski, Touring the Western North Carolina Backroads, Touring the Backroads Series, 3rd ed. Winston-Salem, North Carolina: John F. Blair, 2011, ISBN 9780895875594, p. 181.
  9. ↑ Kanigel, pp. 55, 58.
  10. ↑ Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, New York: Random House, 1984, ISBN 9780394480473, pp. 124–29.
  11. ↑ Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs, ed. Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring, Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2017, ISBN 9780345812018, n.p.
  12. ↑ Peter L. Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs, The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2016, ISBN 9780812247886, p. 20.

Coordinates: 35°57′34″N 82°22′49″W / 35.959556°N 82.380153°W / 35.959556; -82.380153

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