North Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia: Summer Resorts

M. Slaughter’s North Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia: Summer Resorts serves as both a travel guide and a cultural time capsule of Gilded Age leisure, landscape, and hospitality in the American South.

Written at a moment when the mountains and mineral springs of the Southern Highlands were becoming sanctuaries for health and refinement, Slaughter’s work offers detailed descriptions of resorts, hotels, and scenic routes across the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah regions. With a traveler’s enthusiasm and a promoter’s precision, he extols the virtues of mountain air, cool streams, and gracious Southern accommodations—painting a portrait of a world where railways met wilderness, and repose met elegance.

Part travelogue, part advertisement, North Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia: Summer Resorts captures the optimism and aesthetic of a post-Reconstruction South seeking both recovery and recognition. Its pages evoke an era when tourism, health, and nature intertwined to shape the beginnings of modern Southern travel culture.

Complete and unabridged edition of M. Slaughter’s 1884 regional travel guide

Detailed accounts of Southern mountain resorts, spa towns, and natural landscapes

A valuable resource for students of American tourism, 19th-century geography, and Southern history

Essential reading for collectors of travel literature, Americana, and Gilded Age ephemera