Good Food and a Good View with Good Friends You Haven’t Met Yet
A chat with Innkeeper Mort White of the Hemlock Inn in Bryson City
Although it seems like forty lifetimes ago in the Age of COVID, summer before last I posted a photo on Facebook of a clematis vine with beautiful purple flowers outside the room of the mountain inn where Stephen and I were staying. My friend Jennifer immediately commented, “Are you at the Hemlock Inn?” It turns out the inn is owned by her family, and her aunt and uncle are the innkeepers. In typical small Southern world fashion, comment after comment came in from friends who love the Hemlock Inn too.
The Hemlock Inn was built in 1952 near Bryson City, North Carolina by original innkeepers Seth and Lorene Haynie, who ran the inn for twelve years. It passed through the hands of another innkeeping family before it was bought by Jennifer’s grandparents, John and Ella Jo Shell in 1969. Mort and Lainey Shell White, her aunt and uncle, moved back to Bryson City and took over day-to-day operations in 1987 and raised their three boys in the inn.
Everything about the Hemlock Inn exudes family. The meals are family-style around large round tables complete with lazy Susans, and the food is delicious traditional Southern fare. There’s kid-friendly ping pong and shuffle board on the back patio. It’s a popular destination for family reunions. In fact, we are planning our next family reunion there and are quite excited about it. They have regular rooms, and they have cabins for those who want to spread out a little. We visited the inn again with the kids in tow this past summer and had a great time, COVID precautions and all.
I was a little perturbed as friend after friend said they’d visited before—some of them several times—and no one had told us about this great little gem. So I’m going to be kinder to you than they were to me and tell you all about the inn and stuff to do around Bryson City. I called Innkeeper Mort White week before last, and he was kind enough to fill me in on what it’s like to visit the Hemlock Inn and a little about the life of an innkeeping family. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length.
Me: What do you like most about keeping an inn?
Mort White: The interaction with people more than anything else. We think one of the neat things about places like ours is that we get to know our guests. We have a large list of repeat people who come back year after year, so they have become friends. We love sitting around the table after serving breakfast and talking to them and catching up with what’s going on with their children and that sort of thing. And also sitting around with guests who are new and getting to know them and learning their stories.
We have found that if we ourselves won’t talk that much and let the other people tell us their story, we find everybody has an amazing story to tell. It doesn’t make a difference whether you are the president of a college or a garbage collector, you have something interesting to talk about, and we have the most interesting discussions around the table. That’s the fun part, getting to know people. We seem to be so blessed that we have such nice people to come that are always a pleasure to sit and talk with and are always so interesting.
Me: Tell me about some of your regulars. I know some of your regulars from Marietta. The first time we came, we met a retired couple who had been English professors at Kennesaw State University, and Stephen ended up playing dominos with them until well after midnight.
MW: We’ve had guests who have been coming for years. We have guests right now who checked in just yesterday. He said, “Well, we just want you to know that we have celebrated our 59th wedding anniversary earlier this year. That means we’ve been coming here 59 years because we came here on our honeymoon.” They’ve been coming 59 years, and they are just one of a number of people that have come to the inn for over 50 years. Now unfortunately we’re beginning to lose some of those people. It’s not unusual to run into people who have been coming here 20 or 30 years. We have another guest here right now who first came as a younger man. Now he has been coming well over 20 years with his family. It’s unusual because in today’s world there are so many interesting places to visit. A lot of people travel now, and they rarely go back to the same places. For us to have people come back year after year, it’s humbling and gratifying.
Me: You guys have a lot of family reunions who stay with you, right?
MW: Family reunions are a big part of our business. And we think the thing that drives our family reunion business is one, we’ve got some outdoor space where kids can play, and two, we serve the meals the way we do around the large lazy Susan tables. If you have a large group, no one has to cook for them. You don’t have to go out and find a restaurant with a table that can fit fifteen people or a reservation to sit at separate tables or wait a long time for food to be prepared and brought to your table.
Here they walk in, the table is set, food is sitting on the table, and they can all sit and eat around large tables and visit. The kids can get up and go outside to play ping pong or shuffleboard or whatever while the grownups have a nice cup of coffee. The meals themselves are part of the ease of large family reunions. We have a number of family reunions and other reunions. We have groups of hikers that come. We have a church group that comes every year. They’ve been coming every year for thirty-something years. They meet for two nights on our back patio.
Me: You guys have been at the Hemlock Inn for thirty years. How have you seen things change in that time, or has it changed?
MW: The way we do things has not changed much, but the environment around us has changed. We’re in a small town in North Carolina that will never be a big town because most of the land around it is owned by the federal government. When we came here, and especially when the inn was built, there was very little else here. Bryson City has been discovered. They were featured on the Home and Garden Network, and the train that arrives here and the Nantahala Outdoor Center bring more people.
What we’ve noticed is a lot more people building cabins, and other people are putting up lodging, so there is a lot more competition now than there used to be. In terms of the way we operate, we are still old school in the way we serve our meals and in the general atmosphere when guests come in. We operate very much on the honor system. We have a gift shop that does not have a monitor in there. If you see something you like, you can put it on your bill. You can go to the back porch and get a Coca-Cola. There’s a little jar for money. We trust people. We still operate much the way they did in the 50’s.
Me: What’s the most challenging part of your job? What is the hardest thing about being an innkeeper?
MW: Being an innkeeper is not a job; it’s a lifestyle. If you can’t buy into that lifestyle, you’re going to have problems. What we feel is important if you’re going to do your job right as innkeeper is you’ve got to be here. You’ve got to be present. The challenging thing is the hours. That’s really it. If you have other employees, and we have some really nice, fine employees, they reduce your daytime hours. The work is too large for just our family. But you really need to be here, especially at mealtimes. Our weeks don’t stop. We don’t take weekends off. We don’t take nights off. Nights are a busy time, and we are open seven days a week. You take a break when you can during the day, but we work a seven-day week. That’s kind of the norm. What we feel is important is to try to pace ourselves.
Me: You guys close the inn for a couple of months, right?
MW: We do, in the winter time. It’s not because we want to close and get a rest, although that is really nice to do, but we just don’t have enough people come in the winter time. There is no ski slope in the area. We don’t get heavy snow. We primarily attract people who want to come and take advantage of the outdoor activities—hiking in the Smokys, white water rafting, riding the train, zip-lining—all those kinds of things we really don’t do in the winter time. Winter time is a good time to hike, but this area is still very seasonal. We shut down during the coldest winter months, drain the buildings, and cram all of our weekends that we don’t get during the year into those three months. That’s our time to rest and do repairs.
Me: How have things changed for y’all with COVID? I know you were closed for a while.
MW: We were not allowed to open the first month. We normally open up at the end of April. Of course, this started flaring up in March, and we realized pretty quickly that we were not going to be able to open up. We were finally allowed to open on a restricted basis around Memorial Day. So we were a month late. Our restrictions for us revolve around the dining room. Our dining room can seat 60 people, but we can only have about 30. We moved a lot of chairs around at the tables and spaced them out. We moved some of the rocking chairs off the porches and spaced them out a little bit more.
The biggest thing is we have been restricted in the number of people we can take at any time. We can’t make it up like a restaurant and say we will do more seatings. We just have the one seating. It hasn’t been all that bad. We are staying fairly busy, although not as busy as we usually are. Some people are drawn to our place because we are a remote kind of place, and with COVID people don’t want to go to a place that’s high density. We’re on 57 acres, and we are sitting here all by ourselves. We’re only going to have about 30 people, and you don’t have to worry about going out to eat at a restaurant where you have to worry about how many other people are going to be there. The tables and chairs are all spread out. We’ve just adapted to it. We do require face masks. North Carolina is a face mask state, so we do require face masks, and we require everybody to sanitize their hands before they get to the table.
A Breakfast Favorite
The Hemlock Inn has a cookbook called Recipes From Our Front Porch with recipes for most of the food they serve at breakfast and dinner. Amazon has one copy left for the low, low price of $801.77. If you call Mort directly, he’ll sell you one for $25 and ship it to you.
One of our breakfast favorites is the Hemlock Bran Muffins. They are nutritious and delicious. Mort said he’d be glad to share the recipe.
Hemlock Bran Muffins
3 cups sugar
5 cups all-purpose flour
1 (15-ounce) box raisin bran cereal (They use Kellogg’s)
1 teaspoon salt
5 teaspoons baking soda
4 eggs, slightly beaten
4 cups buttermilk
16 tablespoons butter or margarine, melted
Mix dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Mix wet ingredients together and fold into the dry mixture. Place in a covered bowl in the refrigerator and take out desired amount as needed. Batter will keep for two months. Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes.
Yield: 48 large muffins
(I like to make these a few hours ahead of when I want to bake them so the bran cereal flakes soak up the buttermilk mixture.)
Things To Do In and Around Bryson City, North Carolina
Mort had a few suggestions of things to see and do near the inn.
Deep Creek in Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the star attraction, and it’s only a few minutes drive from the Hemlock Inn. You can rent a tube from nearby vendors and take as many runs down Deep Creek as you want. There are hikes to waterfalls, and it’s a really nice way to spend some time in the outdoors.
Bryson City is a quaint little town with shops and art galleries, restaurants and breweries. It’s a fun place to visit.
White water rafting on the Nantahala River is a great way to stay cool. We like to use Nantahala Outdoor Center when we go rafting there.
Great Smoky Mountain Railroad is on our list of things to do when we visit next summer.
The play, Unto These Hills, tells the story of the Cherokee people in nearby Cherokee, North Carolina. It is on hiatus in 2020 due to COVID-19, but hopefully it will be back soon.
Or you can sit in a rocking chair on the back porch of the inn, hang out by the fireplace, or play cards in the sunroom. The view is definitely worth it:
Interesting Stuff From The Interwebs
Sportsmanship is always in style and warms the heart.
One of the few places in the world you can see synchronous fireflies in action is in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Researchers are studying the way the insects communicate with their flashing lights in hopes of creating robot drones that can operate without human control. Not sure what I think about that last part, but the firefly communication is cool.
Halloween is this weekend. Find you an engineer who can make this candy delivery system.
Speaking of engineers, researchers at Georgia Tech implemented an aggressive COVID-19 test and trace program for students and staff on the Georgia Tech campus this semester, and in conjunction with universal mask wearing, they have been successful in keeping the virus contained. My daughter, a first year at Tech, and her friends participate in the testing program every week. You can read about the program here.
Puppy shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Puppy shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Thanks for hanging out with me again this week! If you missed last week’s newsletter, I had a great talk with the Senior Buyer for my favorite independent bookstore, Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. Asheville is about an hour east of the Hemlock Inn, so you could add that to your list of fun things to do while you’re staying there. A big thank you to Mort White for sharing his experiences in innkeeping with me. I hope you all have a fun and safe Halloween!
Until next time,
Karla
Just got around to reading this one. The Hemlock sounds idyllic! I can’t wait to start traveling again. Asheville and Bryson City are on my list!