The Many Thoughts of Wanda Kidd

In the early spring of 1975, when I was a student at Western Carolina University, I drove up the winding mountain road toward the community of Tuckaseigee. My sister and I got word that Mr. Harley Saunders might have a house we could rent. There were not many rentals in the area back then, or this “house” would not have been on anyone’s radar. It cost $60 a month, and it was grossly overpriced, but that is a story for another day.

The ride up Highway 107 toward the rental was a beautiful and unspoiled journey. The Tuckaseigee River shaped the road on one side, and little coves with outcroppings of granite lined the other side. Every so often, a humble mountain home sat tucked in one of the coves, but around one curve, standing sentry up on the side of the mountain, stood a majestic yellow lodge with green cedar shakes. A sign at the bottom of the drive said “Rest-a-bit Lodge,” and I was immediately enthralled.

I rode back and forth by that lodge every day while we rented that little hovel up the road and then weekly for another year while I worked with a community youth group in the Cashiers area. Through it all, I imagined what the lodge would look like inside and about the stories it could tell. It turns out that a massive flood in August of 1940 destroyed many of the structures along that stretch of the river, but the lodge’s position on the hill prevented its destruction. The fact that it remained only added to its mystique.

Fast forward eight years after my graduation, I was back in Jackson County doing an internship at the Baptist Student Union and finishing up my seminary degree. This time around, I was married. We had a daughter and expecting another child when we decided to make the area our home. My husband opened a CPA practice, and we began to look for a place to buy. The realtor patiently took me to some very ordinary 1960 homes on the market for several days, but they just did not speak to me. Finally, I said, “Do you have anything with some character, more like a lodge.” The two realtors looked at each other with suspicious expressions and said, “Well, we did have one that came on the market a week ago, but it needs a lot of work.” “Could you show me a picture?” I asked,

When she showed me the listing, I gasped. The picture was of the lodge that caught my imagination a decade before, a little worse for wear, but the same sentry on the mountain. I looked at them with wonderment and said, “It’s my house.” I called my husband and said,” I have found our home” He tried to reason and persuade me into rethinking my resolve, but in the end, I convinced him that the house “needed me,” and he relented.

People have told us fascinating stories about its history through the years, and we added decades of our own. I will share some of those stories in future posts, but I needed to mark the completion of our part of its story. After ten years of longing and thirty-six years of stewardship this past Friday, we sold the old Rest A Bit Lodge. The new owners told my husband that when he told people they had bought the Kidd’s place, people immediately knew where it was. That was a startling statement because I never once thought of it as the Kidd’s place. We were just keepers of the stories. He also said we would not recognize the property in six months. I will, however, remember its legacy and lore because it has quite a colorful past, and I hope we preserved some of the stories for those who came before.