American Queen Research
Rediscovering Our History
Happy Land Map by publisher Thomas Nelson
Book Research
re-discovering the happy land
& the only american queen
The Asheville Citizen, July 11, 1957
The article on page two of The Asheville Citizen from July 11, 1957, explores the beginnings of the Kingdom of the Happy Land, a vision brought to life by Robert Montgomery. After the Civil War, Montgomery, a former slave owner, sought a new beginning for himself and his former slaves. With the abolition of slavery, these newly freed individuals faced numerous challenges and uncertainties as they navigated their newfound freedom.
Articles on The Happy Land
by: Jon Elliston
It began, the stories say, with a search party of sorts: a caravan of emancipated African Americans traveling up from the Deep South, looking for a place where they could embrace freedom, safety, and self-sufficiency—a haven for putting down roots and building a new life. They found it in the southern reaches of Henderson County, where they established the Happy Land, or perhaps the Kingdom of the Happy Land—accounts differ on the precise name. For decades following the Civil War, a singular communal experiment existed, and it became the stuff of legend.
02.
Kingdom of the Happy Land
The Kingdom of the Happy Land began as a roving band of freed slaves from Mississippi who earnestly set out to establish a cooperative kingdom based on the philosophy of “one for all, and all for one.” According to A Brief History of the Black Presence in Henderson County, “It is a story, not unlike the biblical one of Moses and a band of wandering people who left the intolerably harsh conditions of slavery to begin a new life. Their dream was rooted in an ancestral tribal memory and sustained by the hope for a Promised Land.”
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The Kingdom of the Happy Land
High above the tiny Henderson County town of Tuxedo, on a knoll where every step is cushioned by a thick growth of turkey-foot fern, Ed Bell stops in his tracks and gestures toward a pile of weathered, mossy flagstones.
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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 a story, not unlike the Biblical story of Moses, of a band of wandering people who left the intolerably harsh conditions of slavery to begin a new life. Their dream was rooted in an ancestral tribal memory and sustained by the hope for a Promised Land. When they finally stopped in Henderson County on the border of North and South Carolina, the land on which they settled came to be known as the Kingdom of the Happy Land.
05.
The Kingdom of the Happy Land
Ronnie Pepper grew up in Hendersonville, in a neighborhood where migrant workers sometimes lived. His grandparents rented a small house there, without running water. There were two bedrooms. One of the rooms had two beds. In one, Ronnie slept with his mother, brother, and sister. In the other, his aunt slept with her three boys. His grandparents had the other bedroom and his uncles slept on the pull-out sofa. “We had a lively house!” he recalls.
There is a happy land, far, far away
There Is A Happy Land, Far, Far Away … Come To That Happy Land, Come, Come Away. “There Is A Happy Land,” 1838 Hymn By Andrew Young