The Highland Lake Inn & Resort in Flat Rock has been listed for sale for $6,650,000 by Beverly-Hanks Real Estate firm, with main office in Asheville.

According to WHKP sources, the Inn is currently owned by the Grup family and historically dates back to 1789 when John Earle received a Land Grant, and established the first grist mill and opened the first road to the area. 

The real estate firm and Highland Lake Inn web sites proudly exhort the property as containing some 26 acres with a variety of buildings featuring 47 rooms in an array of cottages, main lodge, Woodward House and homes along with meeting space, reception facilities and award-winning Seasons Restaurant.

The property was formerly owned and operated by the Lindsey family from 1985 until it was sold to the current owners in 1999.

It is located between the Spartanburg and Greenville highways, across from Flat Rock Park, formerly the Highland Lake Golf Course.  It is only minutes from the Flat Rock Playhouse and the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic site. 

The resort's web site states that in 1872, the Inn was sold to George Trenholm, Secretary of the Confederate Treasury, who lived there one year and sold it. In 1873, William Aiken, Governor of South Caroina purchased the property and passed it on to his daughter, Mrs. A. Burnet Rhett, whose father-in-law, Robert Barnwell Rhett, owned "The Charleston Mercury" and was the author of the first draft of the Ordinance of Secession. 

In 1910, Joseph Holt and a gorup of Columbia and Charleston, SC businessmen organized the Highland Lake Club buying nearly 500 acres of lane in the Flat Rock area and enlarged the lake to the largest in the county at that time. 

In 1915 Fleet School for Boys operated there and in the summer operated as a hotel, which later burned. 

In 1941, Robroy Farquhar opened "The Old Mill Playhouse" in the mill, starring actresses Kim Hunter and Joanne Woodward.  It would later move and become known as the Flat Rock Playhouse. 

It's history continued and in the late 1940's and 1950's operated as a summer camp and school for young people of the Jewish faith and later as Our Lady of the Hill's Camp, a Catholic camp for boys and girls on Madonna Lake, now Highland Lake. 

A call by WHKP to the current owner for comment on the listing was not returned.