The opinions expressed in this piece are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carolina Journal or its publisher.
At Exit 53 on I-26 in Henderson County, there’s a small brown highway marker that points toward Connemara. That is the Flat Rock estate where Carl Sandburg spent his final 22 years. He died there on July 22, 1967.
By the time he arrived, in 1945, Sandburg didn’t have anything left to prove. He was 67, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and the man who had penned the life of Lincoln. North Carolina eventually named him an honorary ambassador of a state he wasn’t even born in…