At the beginning of the 19^th century, North Carolina was the primary source of gold produced in the United States. The discovery of the precious metal in North Carolina resulted in the nation's first gold rush. With the arrival of the Christopher Bechtler, Sr. family in Rutherfordton, the town became the center of regional minting activity for the southeast. Christopher Bechtler, Sr., an experienced coin master from Germany, opened a jewelry and watch-making shop on Main Street in July 1830.

The family's home on West 6th Street, erected in 1838, is visible from this room to the North.

Raleigh Rutherford Haynes, born on June 30, 1851, is considered to be the father of the textile industry in Rutherford County.  As a young man Haynes prospered early and invested much capital in buying vacant farms until he was one of the largest landowners in Rutherford County.

Haynes began the development of the Henrietta Mills in 1887. This operation constituted the first modem textile plant in western North Carolina. Haynes built a second textile plant which gave rise to the community of Caroleen.  In 1897, he helped erect the Florence Mill in the Town of Forest City.

In October 1899, Haynes’ endeavors resulted in another textile mill town, which became home to several Haynes controlled operations including the Cliffside Railroad and the Haynes Bank. The Town of Cliffside constituted one of the largest textile operations in the western portion of the state.

Born in 1885, Dr. Benjamin Earle Washburn spent his childhood years on the Cleghorn Plantation, six miles southwest of the Town of Rutherfordton. In 1912, Washburn and his wife, Zillah, who was a nurse, established a medical practice in the isolated and impoverished south mountains of Rutherford County, North Carolina. This experience was later described and recounted in Washburn’s widely-popular book, “A Country Doctor in the South Mountains,” published in 1955.

It has been observed that some of the most extraordinary people come into the world under the most ordinary circumstances. Franklin Coxe, the industrialist, railroad executive, land baron, hotel and church builder, was one such person. Coxe was born on November 2, 1839, in the front room of a rented home on North Main Street in Rutherfordton. His grandfather, Tench Coxe, Sr., of Philadelphia, had served as the Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury under Alexander Hamilton. The family at one time owned more land in this country than any other citizen.

His legacy can be seen locally in the form of St. Francis Episcopal Church, located on Main Street in Rutherfordton. The church, erected in 1899, was Coxe’s memorial to his parents, Francis Sidney and Jane McBee Alexander Coxe. The chapel is considered to be the finest example of Gothic-Revival architecture in western North Carolina. It is home to an impressive collection of religious stained glass including three windows manufactured by the Louis C. Tiffany Company in New York.

Legend says that while driving out of Rutherfordton to the Green River Plantation one afternoon in 1905, Ethel Norris stood up in a horse-drawn buggy and exclaimed, “Henry, there is just the place for our hospital!”  What they envisioned was far greater than the collection of aging school structures in need of repair that crowned the hilltop. Together they saw what would become their life's greatest work and one of Rutherford County’s greatest assets – The Rutherford Hospital.

In the last years of the 18^th century, Tench Coxe, Sr., of Philadelphia, made significant purchases of land in North Carolina that helped shape the destiny of Rutherford County and its citizens. In the course of four years, Coxe amassed more than a half-million acres of land (much of it in present-day Rutherford County) with the purpose of dividing it into smaller tracts and advertising it for sale to men and women traveling down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania to the Carolina frontier.

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Rutherford County is the location of more than ten significant buildings designed by Louis H. Asbury in the 1920s and 1930s.  Asbury is considered to be North Carolinas most important architect of the early 20th century. During his 53-year career, which began in 1903, Asbury designed more than 550 significant governmental, commercial, financial and residential buildings and homes across North Carolina.

The Charlotte native extended a neighborly kindness to the Town of Rutherfordton when he designed the Norris Library building on Main Street in 1933, without charging for his services.

Other buildings designed by Asbury here included the Rutherford County Court House (1926), Cliffside Elementary School (1921), The Rutherford County Home for the Aged & Infirm (1924), Harris School (1931), and Spindale United Methodist Church (1951).

John Pike (1911-1979), who rendered artwork that illustrated the covers and pages of magazines such as Life, Collier's, Fortune, Reader's Digest and The Saturday Evening Post, married into a Rutherford County North Carolina family, and spent more than four decades here as a part-time resident.

By the early 1800s the ever expanding settlement of North America caused a tremendous pressure on the demand for space in the South.  Native Americans were relocated from their lands, many forcibly.  In the 1830s, forced relocations began in earnest, among them the Cherokee.  They were removed from western North Carolina and neighboring states and made to walk the “Trail of Tears,” a term shared by the Five Civilized Tribes.