A Mansion in the Mountains: The Story of Moses and Bertha Cone and Their Blowing Rock Manor

This book tells the engrossing story of Moses and Bertha Cone, builders of the stunning Flat Top Manor in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Wilma Dykeman, a noted author of Appalachian books, said, "The most surprising fact about The Story of Moses and Bertha Cone and their Blowing Rock Manor is that it has waited so long to be told...This historic dwelling and the grandeur of its diminished but still significant natural setting once belonged to a family whose emergence reflects much of our national history. To suggest the scope of influence: Cone family roots in America began with the arrival in 1846 of a seventeen-year-old German immigrant in backwoods of Virginia and his rise from a peddler to a successful merchant in Baltimore. His son, Moses Cone, became one of the country's leading textile manufacturers, Southern philanthropist, and builder of Flat Top Manor. Two of his daughters were intimate friends of Gertrude Stein and French painters of the period." Catheri! ne W. Bishir, author of North Carolina Architecture, said, "With a keen sense of the people and their times, Noblitt offers intriguing glimpses into the Cone family operation of textile mills and villages, the social life and manners in the mansion, the workmen who ran the estate grounds and orchards, and, not least, the adventures of Moses' art collecting sisters, Claribel and Etta Cone and their friendships in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Henri Mattise. This is a great story, well told."