But when she interrupted the auction and bought the rambling Victorian structure, she affected hundreds of young girls' lives for the next 80 years.

Today the Skyland Camp for Girls is hosting third and fourth-generation campers who come to the hillside camp nestled between Chambers Mountain and Clyde. The camp is still operated by descendants of the woman who was determined no outsiders would get their hands on "her hotel."

The original building, where the youngest. campers live during their stay, celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. Before Mrs. Harris bought it in 1916, the facility never prospered as a hotel - some historians suggest smell from the stockyards beside the railroad through Clyde was a factor, others believe there was little for visitors to do nearby. It changed hands several times. Among its owners were the Southern Baptist Association, and at one time it served as a dormitory for the old Haywood Institute. But by the time Mrs. Harris discovered it, it had reverted to a hotel.

Harris' husband, Robert Alexander Harris, was an executive with Southern Railroad who told his wife she could take their five children and vacation anywhere the railroad would take her, said Bunny Brown, now operator of the camp. Brown is the wife of Harris' grandchild, Timothy Brown.

"She fell in love with this place, and she came here every year," she said.

"One year, 1916, she was up here with the kids, and she put on an apron and went into the kitchen to help the ladies get breakfast ready." The cooks in the kitchen told their guest they were soon to lose their jobs, for the hotel was being auctioned that very minute.

"They can't do that," Mrs. Harris exclaimed. 'They're not going to do away with our hotel."

"She stayed in the kitchen long enough to get the details from the cook, then she paraded to the screen door and stood there with her hands on her hips," Brown said. "The auctioneer said, 'Do I hear any more bids?' and she said, 'I'll give you three thousand dollars for the whole kit and caboodle.'

"There was dead silence; women didn't do that, didn't participate in auctions. And the auctioneer said, 'Sold to the lady in the apron.'"

Mrs. Harris then walked to the nearest telephone -- which was in Canton and called her husband.

"When she told him she had committed him to $3,000 for this place ... he said 'I'll give you one year to do something with it for revenue, or it's going back on the auction block,'" Brown said. "She said 'Fair enough.'"

Mrs. Harris returned to her home in Jacksonville, rounded up neighbors and friends and convinced them to vacation at her hotel in Clyde. The next summer, she opened it as a girls' camp, using some of those same neighbor-women as chaperones. This year marks the camp's 81st summer.

"Many people in Haywood County who are older remember Granny Harris and the 'bloomer girls,' as they called them," Brown said. The girls were known for their blue serge bloomers and their middy blouses.

Weaver Green, one of the Green family from Chambers Mountain, had a backboard and mule, Brown said, and would arrive at the train station to pick up the campers' luggage; the girls had to walk. He got 10 cents a duffel. Later he would haul the luggage up in a Ford jalopy truck, Brown said.

When first started, the camp had no electricity and no indoor plumbing. One incentive for adding electricity, Brown said, was the habit children had of exploding the kerosene lamps.

"The kerosene lamps were the only light, and she would give each group of youngsters a lantern," Brown said. "Granny Harris would give instructions that if the lanterns ever flared up, just to fling it over the edge of the house, away from the house. ...So the children would purposely make the lanterns flare up so they could have the fun of throwing them over, because they would explode when they hit the ground." Brown has two of those old lanterns at her home at the top of the hill, possibly the only two to survive those antics, she said.

Mrs. Harris ran the camp with the help of two of her daughters until two years before her death in 1946, Brown said. Then those daughters, Frances Brown and Helen Harris, ran the camp until the 1970s. Helen never married; the camp was her life, Brown said. She died in 1989 at age 90. Frances married briefly, then spent her years at the camp and as a concert pianist.

Brown's destiny changed dramatically the summer she attended Skyland Camp. She met her husband through the camp, and it was there she found her calling as its director. But she almost didn't come.

Because of family connections, "I was supposed to go to Keystone Camp over in Brevard," she said. "I was given a camp application in my stocking from Santa Claus." Then Keystone suddenly had to close for a year. Knowing her child was set on camp, Brown's mother went around Jacksonville looking for another option, and found Skyland. Brown returned every summer.

"Our lives just melded," Brown said of her and her husband. "I've been a part of this family since I was 8 years old."

Brown, and a multitude of other girls, came from Florida to the camps in Haywood County, arriving by train.

"We would ride all night long on the Pullman, and get into Asheville the next morning," she said. "Then it would take an hour to switch the trains because they needed another kind of engine to pull to Clyde, and it would be midday before we arrived."

Brown camped at Skyland in 1943, and cooks were still using a wood stove then, she said, The camp acquired gas stoves in the late '40s or early 1950s.

In its early years, Harris and her daughters brought black women from Florida who would do the cooking. Those women lived on the third floor of the big building, and the campers adored them, Brown said. Now, cooks from the Haywood County school system run the camp kitchen in the summer, and a food specialist for the high schools helps plan the menus.

"We had horseback riding, games, drama, volleyball ... softball, archery, parties," she said. "They call them discos now, but in those days it was a cabaret party. We did more things together, it wasn't so organized. We took very few trips, went to Cherokee and Clingman's Dome."

Though electricity and plumbing had been added by Brown's time, the camp had no hot water for bathing, she said.

At that time, the campers stayed for eight weeks. In the 1930s, that stay cost $150, according to old brochures. Now the camp offers four-week sessions, though campers can stay only two. Cost is $450 per week.

As late as the 1950s, campers commonly arrived by train. By that time one of Harris' close friends had also started a camp in Haywood County, Camp Junaluska. Others would be taking the train from Florida to camps in Henderson and Transylvania counties, and each camp had its own car, Kate Gholston said. Gholston is a camp alumnus who has returned to help with the camp this summer.

"They told us to stay in our own cars," Gholston said. "Big chance of that ... We would run through the other cars screaming Skyland Camp songs, then they would run through our car, screaming their camp songs."

In 1967, the Browns were living in Houston, where Timothy worked for NASA and Bunny had taught school. Helen and Frances sent for Bunny that year, saying they needed help running the camp. So she took their three children and headed to Clyde for the summer. That began a long series of summers that Timothy and Bunny spent apart, with Bunny taking over full operation of the camp in 1973. Now Timothy is retired, and the Browns live in Clyde year-round.

Except for the wiring, the old house is structurally much the same as it was in the days when Mrs. Harris arrived as a hotel guest. The kitchen and dining areas have been enlarged, and a portion of the bottom front porch has been screened in to use as a dining area. The entire second-floor porch has been screened in as well, for that is where the young campers sleep, their beds facing out from the building like spokes on a wheel. To allow rain and snow to run off, the upstairs porch floor was built at an angle, so the campers' feet are a little lower than their heads when they're sleeping.

While most of the building looks like a camp, with towels, shorts, stuffed animals and duffel bags scattered throughout, the parlor retains the feel of an old hotel, with its shelves of old children's books surrounding a place and watercolors by Frances Brown, Harris' daughter, gracing the walls.

Outside are several cabins where older campers sleep, a gymnasium, tennis courts, a stream-fed pond for swimming, a riding ring and stables. While the camp had the old Leatherwood farmhouse demolished, believing it beyond repair, the barn was refurbished. The demolished farmhouse had been built in 1898, and the barn had been built to go with the house that stood before it, making it among the oldest barns in Haywood County, Brown said.

"When we redid it, they told me it would be cheaper to tear it down and rebuild," she said. "I told them I couldn't do that; my alums would kill me."