Mr. Rawles–many thanks for the response! We live in Henderson county and before that my family lived up in Buncombe county, so I laughed when I read the letter from your other reader. Henderson county has an extremely high per capita savings and a LOT of poor people, so somebody is skewing the results somehow. Lots of rich transplants from up North. Jurassic Park. Buncombe county is on a lot of “best places to live” lists…and real estate and cost of living increases reflect that. Rolling Stone magazine called it the “freak capital of the south”…and it is. Kind of the “San Francisco of the east coast”. Henderson County is where the Mother Earth News was started and produced for many of the early years, Back Home magazine [published by the original editors of the pre-yuppie era Mother Earth News] is still produced down the road from us…so there is a history of “back to the landers” around here…but the days of cheap farm land is long past. The minute a place hits the “best place to live list” seems to be kind of a kiss of death….both Hendersonville and Asheville are on all the lists.[JWR Comments: The same thing happened to Sandpoint, Idaho and Missoula Montana.]
On another note, my father grew up near St. Maries, Idaho. from what I remember…still owns 40 acres up there so hopefully we’ll get a chance to relocate at some point. I agree that Idaho is pretty great…not as trendy as Colorado or some of the other western states. Hopefully it will stay that way for a while. Good fortune getting some of the other readers to ante up…a buck per 50,000 readers would keep you up and running for a while, I suppose. Looking forward to reading the blog. – P.R.
JWR Adds: Boston T. Party’s rankings (in Boston’s Gun Bible) on firearms freedom are North Carolina: 66%, and South Carolina: 64%