The village had once been a thriving community, part of the tuberculosis sanitarium business. When the railroad had finally pierced the mountains of western North Carolina in the early 1880s, some of the first to flood in were tuberculosis victims. They came by the thousands to the sanitariums that sprang up on every sunlit mountain slope. By the early twenties there were a dozen such institutions surrounding Asheville, the big city situated a dozen miles to the west of Black Mountain. And then came the Depression. Black Mountain remained frozen in time until antibiotics became available right
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