The Zachary family of Cashiers embodied the divided loyalties of western North Carolinians during the Civil War. Mordecai Zachary, who built this Greek Revival house about 1850 and furnished much of it himself, had strong Confederate ties, and Confederate Gen. Wade Hampton sent his family to a hunting lodge across the road for safety during the war. Mordecai’s brother and near neighbor Alexander remained a Unionist and, though too old to serve, aided Federal soldiers who escaped from Confederate prisons in South Carolina and traveled through the mountains toward Union lines. William H. Thomas, a politician, promoter of western North Carolina, and white Cherokee chief, was among the travelers on the Tuckasegee-Keowee Turnpike who stopped at Mordecai’s house; when the war began, Thomas enlisted white and Cherokee men for his Confederate unit, Thomas’s Legion, in which Mordecai served according to his tombstone inscription. Alexander’s sons served on both sides: Christopher Columbus Zachary enlisted in Co. F, 29th North Carolina Infantry, rose to sergeant, later deserted, returned to western North Carolina, and then rode with the Bushwhackers, Union Col. George W. Kirk’s 3rd North Carolina Mounted Infantry, which attacked Confederate units in the mountains; another son, fourteen-year-old Thompson R. Zachary, guided escaped Union officers through Cashiers Valley to Federal lines in Knoxville, Tennessee. After the war Alexander remained in Cashiers, and in 1873 Mordecai sold the house to former South Carolina congressman Armistead Burt, a leader in the secession movement before the war, then moved to a farm near Cherokee in Swain County next to Thomas’s property. The Tolbert family bought the house in 1909.