The earliest of the true artists of photography to discover Highlands was John Bundy, who arrived from Indiana in August, 1883, to live with Joshua Hadley in the recently vacated Dimick house on East Main. For the next two months, beginning with a photograph of Highlands House, he took views of the new village and its surroundings-including street scenes; the mountains of Satulah, Fodderstack, and Whiteside; and Glen and Cullasaja (Dry) Falls. These he put on exhibition for the public at Henry Bascom's store.

Bundy's successor in Highlands was R. Henry Scadin, a 25-year-old photographer and fruit grower who came to North Carolina with his wife Kate in 1886 after living in Michigan and Vermont. He kept meticulous diaries of his life from 1886 to 1921, which Kate and his son Dewey continued until five years after his death in Vermont in 1923.

With the eye of a genuine artist, he photographed the local scenery and people near the present towns of Brevard, Tryon, Saluda, Sapphire, and Asheville, extending as far west as Highlands. Since 1989, the University of North Carolina at Asheville has collected 1,200 of his glass plate negatives, covering 1889-1920, in its D. H. Ramsey Special Collection, including 43 manuscripts of his own diaries and five of his wife's and son's.

Over 50 of these photographs focus on Highlands and vicinity. He captured sights of Whiteside Cove and Whiteside Mountain, Shortoff and Satulah mountains, Horse Cove, Glen Falls, Dry Falls, and Lower Cullasaja Falls that few photographers since have been able to surpass for their perspective and composition as well as graphic detail. In 1897 he put together some "combination views" for a booklet of Highlands and made his photographs available through stores in town.

Many of Scadin's subsequent Highlands scenes he photographed during 1897 and 1898, despite frequent colds and periods of homesickness that left him physically debilitated and mentally depressed. Beginning in 1907 he converted a number of his photos into hand-colored postcards. He added street scenes and panoramic views in 1910.

By 1913 poor health had begun to take its toll. Accustomed to walking between Highlands and Whiteside Cove, Horse Cove, Franklin, and Sapphire, Scadin complained at age fifty-two that the treks had become very tiring. "I will have to give up such tramps before long as I find them very hard for me to do now," he lamented in his diary. He moved for his health from Amherst, Massachusetts, to Dana, N.C. And receiving no further orders for Highlands cards, he destroyed the glass negatives rather than transport them with him.

His most productive period on the Highlands plateau spanned sixteen years from 1896 to 1912, and many of his masterpieces are still circulated today as copies of those originals that once sold as individual pictures, postcards, booklets, and calendars.