By Robert L. Williams

• 1: Introduction
• 2: Gorge Grows Popular for Movie-Making
• 3: From Murder to Lost Gold: Legends of the Gorge
• 4: Visiting the Gorge Today
• Download the full article as a

Gorge Grows Popular for Movie-Making

Shortly afterwards, the world found Hickory Nut Gorge. Presidents, authors, movie celebrities, and political figures discovered that Hickory Nut Gorge was the perfect spot to vacation or settle down. Famed movie director Thomas Ince, friend of Charlie Chaplin and William Randolph Hearst, shot movies there. Soon moguls like John Ford, D.W. Griffith, Mack Sennett, Cecil B. DeMille, Mary Pickford, and William S. Hart came to Hickory Nut Gorge.

Between 1915 and 1920, more than 75 movies were filmed in Hickory Nut Gorge. Bob Cummings, star of the hit television comedy series in the 1950s, “Love That Bob,” appeared in 1915 as a villain in a silent movie called, “Heart of the Blue Ridge.” In the movie, Cummings, who, like Dick Clark, never seemed to grow old, dies in a fall from one of the cliffs in the gorge.

Hollywood still finds the gorge to be the perfect setting for films, and stars like Clark Gable, Kathleen Turner, Patrick Swayze, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jennifer Grey, Claude Akins, Drew Barrymore, Madeline Stowe, and Gloria Swanson lived briefly in the Lake Lure-Chimney Rock area while filming such movies as “Dirty Dancing,” “Last of the Mohicans,” “My Fellow Americans,” “A Breed Apart,” and “FireStarter.”