In 1825, when the state engineer and architect Robert Mills - the same Mills who would design the Washington Monument - rode through northern Greenville County, he stopped long enough to describe Caesars Head as a 'mass of granite, rising from the vale, through which a rapid river winds its turbulent way... the ledges of stone, rising almost perpendicular, and at length, hanging over at the top, so that they seem to totter to their fall.' Mills wasn't given to overstatement. The escarpment really does seem to lean. After the Jones Gap Road opened in 1848, former state senator Benjamin Hagood bought 2,400 acres and built a summer cottage to chase the cool breezes off the cliff. He upgraded to a hotel before he died in 1865, leaving the property to his daughter Eliza and her husband, Dr. Francis Miles.

The Civil War interrupted everything. Confederate deserters hid in the woods around the mountain, and the hotel shut in 1862. By 1876 the Mileses had reopened as a health resort, then sold to E. M. Seabrook of Charleston in 1880. Seabrook expanded the inn but couldn't pay the mortgage, and the property reverted to Miles in 1885. In 1897, in a deal that says everything about how Southern gentry handled retirement, the Mileses signed the property over to Furman University in exchange for an annuity and free room and board for life. Furman sold to developers in 1924. The Marchant brothers bought it in 1946 and added tennis courts and a pool. Then, in the early morning of September 9, 1954, the hotel burned. The original Hagood house went with it.

South Carolina's parks department acquired the land in pieces between 1976 and 1986, joining Caesars Head with neighboring Jones Gap as the Mountain Bridge Wilderness. The hiking draw is Raven Cliff Falls - 420 feet of water plunging through a notch in the escarpment, viewed from a suspension bridge that sways underfoot. Five other waterfalls lace the park. Anglers fish the Middle Saluda River and Julian and Matthews creeks for brook, rainbow and brown trout, artificial lures only. Black bear roam the woods. Peregrine falcons nest on the cliffs. The federally endangered green salamander hides in rock crevices. But the show that draws crowds is the autumn raptor migration: thousands of hawks ride the updrafts where the escarpment forces warm Piedmont air vertical, and the bare granite of Caesars Head becomes the best counting station in South Carolina.