The Kingdom of Happy Land

Freed slaves founded the Kingdom of Happy Land in the 1870’s near today’s Lake Summit. With money they earned as porters carrying packages up the mountain to Saluda, they bought land from the Davis family’s plantation, Oakland.  There is little documentation about the Kingdom and 

The Kingdom of the Happy Land

Throughout the history of Henderson County no other chapter is perhaps so intriguing and yet so veiled in mystery as the efforts of a group of freed slaves to establish a cooperative Kingdom grounded on a philosophy of “one for all, and all for one.” It is