The Mimosa: 1908 Resort Hotel

A handsome 1908 booklet produced by Barnes-Crosby Co. in Chicago — presented here as a slide show of images — offers glimpses of the resort that flourished until the old Mimosa Hotel burned down in 1916. (Its “casino” annex building later became the Mimosa Inn that survives today.) In 1900 Aaron French from Pittsburgh and his half-brother Frank Stearns from Cleveland renovated the old McAboy’s Hotel to create a new sort of resort for the Twentieth Century.

It was the new Progressive Era, turning away from Nineteenth Century formality to Arts & Crafts informality. They decided to add a golf course designed by a young Englishman from upstate New York (where he had already designed a golf course) Robert Leonard, a tennis court, a “casino” annex with ballroom and a bowling alley, and a new name The Mimosa.

Introduced in America by French botanist Andre Michaux in 1785, and planted by Jefferson at Monticello, the Old World mimosa tree was yet unfamiliar to most Americans in 1900. A few grew on the grounds, rather exotic and tropical-looking with fragrant flowers, which attracted birds and butterflies.

R.A. Leonard takes a swing at his new Mimosa Links. Earlier he designed golf practice facility up White Oak Mountain by Log Cabin Inn. Later he laid out Tryon Country Club and courses in Henderson and Rutherford counties as well.

The Mimosa’s specimens flourished and eventually — Japanese honeysuckle and Paulownia too — became invasive around Polk County. More botanical invasives — originally thought appealing — are Wisteria, kudzu, Tree of Heaven and the evergreen English ivy and “oriental bittersweet.” Ironically the vicinity was a magnet around 1900 for prominent botanists, such as Charles Millspaugh and Donald Culross Peattie, who found many indigenous American species growing wild in virgin Polk County forests.