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Southern Appalachia: 50 Events That Put Us On The Map

Illustration by Ali Douglass

Rock City

Georgia State Parks & Historic Sites

Hugh Morton, North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, UNC-CH

Harrah's Cherokee Casino and Resort

From the John Edwards Memorial Foundation Records, #20001, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts

Dollywood Publicity

Visit Knoxville

The Omni Grove Park Inn

Courtesy of the Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer and The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

Photo by Hugh Morton, North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, UNC-CH

Margaret Hester photo

The Biltmore Company photo

Mark Haskett photo

Photo by Hugh Morton, North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, UNC-CH

NPS photo

Crashing tectonic plates put the Appalachian Mountains in place. But how did this region find its way into the imaginations of the world’s traveling public? From the conquistadors and colonists of centuries past to the Appalachian Trail backpackers and smartphone-toting tourists of today, travelers have always been drawn to Southern Appalachia’s dramatic geography. 

“Throughout history, Southern Appalachia has been a place that people passed through—a waypoint,” says Ron Roach, the chair of East Tennessee State University’s Department of Appalachian Studies, pointing to rivers and valleys that allowed easier passage. 

But mountains don’t make their name on convenience. Driven by enterprising locals or a confluence of circumstances, actions big and small have played their parts to help establish tourism as one of this region’s top modern industries. For better and for worse, these 50 events helped set the scene.

Our categories represent the wide spectrum of tourism here—the development of our natural landscape, publications and literature, manmade spectacles, celebration of heritage, sports and recreation, pop culture influences, and, last but not least, inspired marketing gimmicks. 

Of course, we couldn’t include everything. Which pivotal tourism events do you think we missed? Email editor@smliv.com or join the conversation at facebook.com/smliv.

Natural Treasures: Playing up our best features

1831: Hot Springs heats up

Native Americans first discovered the 100-plus-degree mineral waters of present-day Hot Springs, North Carolina. By 1778, colonists had grown hip to its supposed healing properties, sending the sick and lame over the mountains to “take to the waters.” But it was James Patton who helped the natural wonder’s tourism appeal bubble over. Just a few years after the completion of the Buncombe Turnpike, Patton bought the springs in 1831, and the Asheville developer built the Warm Springs Hotel. Fronted by 13 tall columns—one for each of the first colonies—the grand hotel was often called Patton’s White House and featured 350 rooms and a dining room that seated 600. According to an early advertisement, accommodations proved “first-class in every respect” and “vastly superior” to any other summer resort south of the Jersey shore. Two years after the Warm Springs Hotel burned down in 1884, the Mountain Park Hotel debuted in its place with the Southeast’s first organized golf club. Warm Springs officially became Hot Springs after the discovery of a new, hotter spring. These days, the Appalachian Trail runs right through town, and Hot Springs Resort offers a full spa menu as well as soaks in the mineral baths.

1878: Luray Caverns is discovered

On August 13, 1878, five men from Luray, Virginia, stumbled upon a tiny hole in a big hill in the Shenandoah Valley. After hours of pushing loose rocks aside, they had cleared an opening large enough to slide a rope down into the unknown. A spectacular world of stalactites and stalagmites awaited below. Two years later, a team of Smithsonian researchers paid Luray a visit, ultimately reporting that “there is probably no other cave in the world more completely and profusely decorated with stalactitic and stalagmitic ornamentation than that at Luray.” In the century-plus since, Luray Caverns has emerged among the country’s most-visited caves, nearly on par with Kentucky’s Mammoth and New Mexico’s Carlsbad. Unlike those national parks, the National Caves Association defines Luray as a “show cave,” aka one developed for profit. More than 400,000 annual visitors pay to plumb its depths, at $24 per adult, and to hear a tune on the Great Stalacpipe Organ.

1915: Pisgah goes public

Following the sudden death of George Vanderbilt in 1914, his widow Edith sold some 86,000 acres of the Biltmore Estate to the U.S. government, creating one of the first national forests east of the Mississippi River. As she wrote in a letter to Secretary of Agriculture David Franklin Houston, Edith hoped to perpetuate her late husband’s pioneering work in forest conservation and made only one stipulation: to keep the name her husband had given it, Pisgah Forest. These days, mountain bikers love Pisgah for its unparalleled singletrack—considered among the most rugged in the eastern U.S.—through dense thickets of rhododendron where the Vanderbilts camped with their friends more than a century ago.

1933: North Carolina opens its first scenic attraction

Long before a “Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not” cartoon declared Blowing Rock, North Carolina, “the only place in the world where snow falls upside down,” forces of nature shoved the metamorphic cliff out of the mountain over the Johns River Gorge, some 3,000 feet below, creating a wind flume that blasts upward with seemingly supernatural force. The millennia-old geologic phenomenon inspired a Native American legend about a forlorn lover leaping from the rock, only to be blown back into his heart-stricken maiden’s arms. In 1933, the Blowing Rock opened to the public and became North Carolina’s first official scenic attraction. Its handicap-accessible trail takes in views of Hawksbill Mountain, Table Rock, Grandfather Mountain, and Mount Mitchell.

1930s: National parks reshape the Smokies and Shenandoah

Without a doubt, the national parks movement changed this region forever. In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge signed the bill that established the “Great” Smokies as a national park straddling the state line of Tennessee and North Carolina, along with Shenandoah in Virginia. (Park boosters had added “Great” to the Smokies as a branding strategy.) 

After several years of fundraising, the federal government was eventually able to acquire around 300,000 acres of land from the timber companies decimating the hardwood forests as well as from the thousands of rural people living here. In 1934 Congress officially chartered the park, which “set aside in perpetuity a piece of land that captivates the American imagination,” says Richard Starnes, author of Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina (University of Alabama Press, 2006). 

Positioned within driving distance of the majority of the eastern United States, the free park has grown in size to around 500,000 acres and has rarely been more popular, attracting over ten million visitors in 2014—more than double that of any other national park—and generating some $806 million in economic impact in the gateway towns of Tennessee and North Carolina. 

Over in Virginia in 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the 166,000-acre Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains—after the forceful removal of a couple of thousand residents through eminent domain—and in 1939 the park’s scenic lifeline, Skyline Drive, opened to the public, tracing 105 miles of the ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains down the length of the park. Just 75 miles from the nation’s capital, Shenandoah provides a respite for East Coast urbanites, just as Roosevelt intended.

1936: The Blue Ridge Parkway revs up

In the 1930s, as the age of the automobile swept America, Southern Appalachia played its hand wisely. Originally dubbed the “Crest of the Blue Ridge Highway,” the engineering feat known as the Blue Ridge Parkway officially earned the blessing of Congress in 1936. Snaking 469 miles from Virginia to North Carolina, chosen to provide the best mountain views in the eastern U.S., the sculpted motor road has always delighted sightseers seeking “nature through their windshields,” as regional tourism expert Richard Starnes puts it. The final piece of the puzzle—construction of the Linn Cove Viaduct at the base of North Carolina’s Grandfather Mountain—was finally completed in 1987. America’s love affair with cars still has wheels. Nearly 14 million visitors drove on the Parkway in 2014, making it the second most visited unit of the national park service, spending nearly $800 million in North Carolina and Virginia.

1952: Hugh Morton inherits Grandfather Mountain

From different vantages, Grandfather Mountain is said to reveal different faces of an old man. Many men left their mark on this apex of the Blue Ridge Mountains. 

Scientists in the late 18th and early 19th centuries waxed poetically about their explorations of rugged Grandfather Mountain. “The highest mountain in all of America” (as French botanist André Michaux incorrectly wrote in 1794) in this “unbroken wilderness” (according to Harvard botanist Asa Gray in 1841) made John Muir “jump about and sing and glory in it all.” 

But no man built up tourism here like photographer Hugh MacRae Morton, who became the sole owner of Grandfather Mountain in 1952 and constructed the Mile High Swinging Bridge, a 228-foot span over the 80-foot gorge dividing Linville Peak. Beginning in 1955, Morton publicly fought with the National Park Service over the routing of the Blue Ridge Parkway, arguing that to carve a road through the upper reaches of Grandfather Mountain would be “like taking a switch blade to the Mona Lisa,” with Morton ultimately prevailing. 

“A wee bit of the Scottish Highlands” came to Grandfather Mountain with the first annual Highland Games in 1956, popularized by Morton’s photographs of bagpipers on Grandfather’s peaks and clan society tents nestled in its base. Following Morton’s death, North Carolina purchased the majority of Grandfather Mountain’s backcountry in 2009 to develop a state park.

2001: The elk return

By the late 1700s, all of North Carolina’s elk had been killed, and Tennessee’s last elk met their demise less than half a century later. Since park rangers at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park first reintroduced 25 elk to Cataloochee Valley in 2001, followed by another 27 animals in 2002, wildlife lovers have herded here to the North Carolina side of the Smokies, especially during rutting season from late summer to mid October. Today the elk herd numbers more than 150. Remember to keep your distance: By federal law, getting within 50 yards can result in fines or arrest.

In the beginning, there were words: The pen is mighty — Publications that inspired travel

1791: Appalachia gets its first field guide

Called America’s first native naturalist, William Bartram forever changed the landscape of Southern Appalachia with the publication of his rather verbosely titled Travels Through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws; Containing An Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions, Together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians. One scholar of the era touted the book as the most astounding verbal artifact of the young nation. Today, a hiking trail named for Bartram courses from Transylvania into Haywood County and cuts across the Blue Ridge Parkway.

1870s: Doctors write a prescription for Asheville

Before there were antibiotics, there was Asheville. In 1870, Dr. H. P. Gatchell extolled the healing benefits of its temperate climate with his pamphlet, “Western North Carolina—Its Agricultural Resources, Mineral Wealth, Climate, Salubrity and Scenery.” In 1871 Gatchell opened The Villa—the country’s first sanitarium exclusively for tuberculosis patients—in the area of the city now known as the Kenilworth neighborhood. An 1880s booklet, called “Asheville, Nature’s Sanitarium,” described the city as a mecca for the Southerner “as he flees from the mosquito, heat, and malaria of the southern summer, and the Northerner as he shivers from the blizzards of the North and West.” By 1930, Asheville was home to 25 sanitariums, with beds for some 900 patients. 

1913: Our Southern Highlanders seeks the “back of beyond”

Attracted to “an Eden still unpeopled and unspoiled,” Horace Kephart withdrew to the Smoky Mountains in 1904 to escape from an unhappy life in St. Louis. His search of the “back of beyond” brought him to a Hazel Creek cabin, where his writings of mountain people became Our Southern Highlanders. First published in 1913, the collection of essays became the preeminent study of life and lore in Southern Appalachia, though critics fault Kephart’s focus on moonshining and other backwoodsy portrayals. Kephart became friends with George Masa, an Asheville bellhop turned photographer who was born in Osaka, Japan. Kephart’s words and Masa’s pictures helped turn the tide in favor of the Smokies national park campaign. John D. Rockefeller Jr., for one, donated $5 million to the effort after seeing Masa’s photographs. Today, park visitors and Appalachian Trail hikers can pay their respects to the dynamic duo at the 6,217-foot Mount Kephart and 5,685-foot Masa Knob.

1921: The Appalachian Trail is born on paper

Don’t be fooled by the pragmatic title: Benton MacKeye’s essay, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” exemplifies the philosophical tone of early 20th-century American utopianism. More significantly, the article gave birth to the dream of the Appalachian Trail. In the October 1921 edition of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, the former forester from New England proposed a trail connecting a series of work, study, and farming camps along the ridges of Appalachia to serve as a refuge from an increasingly industrialized society. Hikers took up his cause, with the roughly 2,180-mile footpath from Georgia to Maine finally completed in 1937. Eleven years later, Earl V. Shaffer reported walking the entire trail—the first documented thru-hiker—and an American rite of passage took root.

1929: Thomas Wolfe looks homeward

On a trip to Europe in 1926, Asheville native Thomas Wolfe filled 17 ledgers of largely autobiographical writing from his childhood spent in his mother’s boarding house—merely the start of his magnum opus, Look Homeward, Angel. When the novel published in 1929, filled with often unflattering sketches of his hometown’s colorful characters, The Asheville Times called the book a “story told with bitterness and without compassion.” Wolfe became deeply unpopular and stayed away from the city for nearly eight years. However, after the success of his second novel, he returned home a hero in 1937, having increased tourism to Asheville during the Great Depression. Wolfe continues to inspire literary tourism to the region, and today visitors can walk through the Old Kentucky Home boardinghouse (dubbed Dixieland in Look Homeward, Angel), at 48 Spruce Street in downtown Asheville.

1979: Guidebooks blaze trails

By the age of 5, Allen de Hart began hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains; at 10, he learned about the Appalachian Trail while bringing water to Civilian Conservation Corps workers as they built the Blue Ridge Parkway. In 1979, he published the first of his 11 meticulously researched trail guides covering Southern Appalachia. All told, 29 editions of his popular guides have led decades of hikers through the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, and Florida. 

Offering a similar gift to mountain bikers in 1992, Jim Parham launched a pioneering trail guide series, called Off the Beaten Track, which covers more than 2,000 miles of mountain bike trails in the Southeast, including Pisgah, the Smokies, northern Georgia, and eastern Tennessee.

1997: Cold Mountain rises in profile

Asheville-born writer Charles Frazier immortalized Western North Carolina’s Cold Mountain with the 1997 publication of his debut novel, a Civil War epic by the same name. The novel made publishing history, topping the New York Times best-seller list for a record 61 weeks and receiving the 1997 National Book Award for Fiction. In 2000, Asheville’s Highland Brewing Company renamed its winter ale Cold Mountain, a cult favorite released each November, complete with a Twitter account dedicated to tracking its limited release (@ColdMountainTracker). In 2003, a box-office hit starring Nicole Kidman and Jude Law brought the world to the mountains of Western North Carolina—at least in spirit. The movie Cold Mountain was actually filmed in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains.

If you build it, they will come: Modern marvels and gathering places

1827: The Buncombe Turnpike opens up for business

Completed in 1827, the Buncombe Turnpike connected a 75-mile stretch from the Tennessee border along the French Broad River to Asheville and down to South Carolina through the Saluda Gap. At the time, it was considered North Carolina’s finest road and brought prosperity to the land it traversed. “The Buncombe Turnpike tied the low-country planters to their summer retreats in Western North Carolina and made the area more accessible during fever season,” explains tourism expert Richard Starnes. “That led to the seasonal migration of planters and families to places such as Flat Rock and, later, Cashiers.” Following the Civil War, the Western North Carolina Railroad took over as the region’s primary mode of transportation, following much of the same route, and further propelled tourism in the region.

1886: Asheville gets on track

As vice president of the Western North Carolina Railroad, Col. Franklin Coxe exerted his influence to route the track through his adopted hometown. The expansion was completed in 1886, the same year that Coxe opened the elegant Battery Park Hotel on the site where the Grove Arcade now stands (not far from Coxe Avenue). Daily orchestra music, ballroom dancing, fine cuisine, and elevators at the hotel helped solidify Asheville’s reputation as a city of leisure among high society. George Vanderbilt stayed at the Battery Park in 1888; local legend holds that he resolved to make his home here after first setting eyes on the surrounding peaks and lands from the porch of this hotel. 

SEE ALSO: Elkmont makes an early tourism splash in Gatlinburg

1895: Biltmore Estate puts out the welcome mat

The grandson of industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt, George Vanderbilt enriched the fortunes of Asheville when he chose the city’s surroundings as the site for his “country home,” Biltmore House, a 250-room French Renaissance chateau set amid forests and gardens designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Biltmore Estate opened to friends and family with a roaring party on Christmas Eve, 1895, following six years of construction that brought hundreds of the world’s premier artisans, craftsmen, and architects to the mountains of Western North Carolina, some of whom stuck around and set to work beautifying Asheville and other nearby cities. Biltmore validated Asheville’s status as a leisure destination for the elite. By 1930, the Great Depression was taking its toll on Asheville, and “America’s largest home” opened to the public to help increase tourism. Today Biltmore stands among North Carolina’s top attractions, with more than one million annual visitors who tour the home and gardens, dine in six restaurants, shop in more than a dozen stores, sample wine from its prolific winery, explore trails, and more.

1897: Religious assemblies congregate

Since the days of the Second Great Awakening (circa 1800-1830s), the mountains of Southern Appalachia have drawn religious pilgrims. The 1890s dawned the advent of religious retreat centers and meeting grounds here, bringing thousands of followers to Western North Carolina. In 1897, a group of ecumenical church leaders, led by Congregational minister John C. Collins, bought land near Black Mountain, North Carolina, for a Christian settlement. They named it Montreat—short for “mountain retreat”—and hosted their first Christian assembly that July, with some 400 attendees sleeping in tents. Ten years later, Montreat hosted its first Presbyterian conference. Elsewhere, Baptists set up camp at Ridgecrest, east of Black Mountain, followed by the Methodist resort of Lake Junaluska, outside Waynesville. And in 1945, celebrity evangelist Billy Graham and his family moved to Montreat, their home becoming a tourist magnet for church groups who gathered on their front lawn to take pictures.

1902: Chimney Rock inspires a lofty plan

Like many tuberculosis patients around the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Lucius B. Morse sought the healthful climate of Western North Carolina’s Hickory Nut Gorge and often rode horseback to admire Chimney Rock, once paying a local man 25 cents to guide him by donkey to the top. There, legend has it, he dreamed both of establishing the area as a park and of creating a year-round resort on a mountain lake. In 1902, he and his brothers purchased 64 acres of Chimney Rock Mountain, including the giant monolith and cliffs; 25 years later the impounding of the Rocky Broad River created Lake Lure. The 1929 stock market crash made him abandon his own plans, but both Chimney Rock and Lake Lure have taken on a life of their own in pop culture, appearing as backdrops to movies such as The Last of the Mohicans in 1992 and Dirty Dancing in 1987. August 14-15 will bring the sixth annual Dirty Dancing Festival to Lake Lure.

1903: The Switzerland of America takes shape

A few years after some Pittsburgh businessmen formed the Toxaway Company, they embarked on their boldest mission: to dam the Toxaway River and create Appalachia’s largest manmade lake. Soon after the dam’s completion in 1903, the five-story Toxaway Inn opened on the new lake’s shores with luxuries such as long-distance telephones, private indoor plumbing, a billiard parlor, bowling alley, and dinners prepared by French chefs and served on fine linens. For the next 14 years, until the massive flood of 1916 devastated the dam, the inn became a celebrity haunt, with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, and others arriving by private railroad car. Combined with the development of Lake Fairfield and the Fairfield Inn, Lake Sapphire and the Sapphire Inn, and the Franklin Hotel, the resorts of Sapphire Valley became romanticized as the “Switzerland of America.” 

1913: The sun rises on the Grove Park Inn 

Before he became known as the “father of modern Asheville,” Edwin Wiley Grove was a poor farm boy from Tennessee with a silver bullet: Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic, a quinine product that promised to prevent and treat malaria, which plagued the South in the 19th century. By the late 1890s, his tonic outsold Coca-Cola and had become a household staple—and his rags-to-riches story had come true. Afflicted with respiratory problems, Grove followed his doctor to the clean mountain air of Asheville, making his home here in 1898. In 1913, less than one year after breaking ground on Sunset Mountain, the Grove Park Inn opened to much fanfare. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan gave remarks to some 400 Southern gentlemen. In the 1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald spent two summers here, attempting to rest from tuberculosis and write while his wife, Zelda, lived across the valley at a psychiatric hospital. The Omni Grove Park Inn, as it is called today, remains one of Asheville’s top attractions, but Grove’s influence extends beyond the hotel’s sunset view. Appalachian tourism author Richard Starnes notes that Grove marked the transition between health and leisure tourism. In addition to building his inn, he also purchased a number of sanitariums in town and burned them down, making the point that “you can’t be a playground for the leisure class if you’re also a place where people come to die.”

1916: Summer camps spring up

Since the 1910s, the hills around Brevard, North Carolina, have been the stomping grounds for summer camps and the kids who flock here from around the country. The oldest operating private summer camp in the Southeast, Keystone Camp opened in 1916 by Florence Ellis and Fannie Holt, featuring tents on raised platforms. Today, Holt’s fourth-generation niece runs the all-girls camp. As Keystone approaches its 100th birthday, it counts among several Transylvania County camps to predate the Great Depression. An alumnae weekend for adults is in the works.

1960: Hickory begins its shopping spree

Thanks to freight trains that rumbled through Western North Carolina carrying Southern hardwood lumber, Hickory began fashioning itself into a furniture hub in the early 20th century. By mid-century, the Catawba Valley had emerged as the nation’s capital of furniture manufacturing. In 1960, Hickory furniture makers began displaying their wares for retail buyers, paving the way for the 1985 opening of the massive Hickory Furniture Mart, which now welcomes more than half a million shoppers each year, helped in part by national press exposure including “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

1982: Knoxville hosts the world

“You got to be there” proclaimed ads for the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee. And from May through October, some 11 million visitors heeded their call, including President Ronald Reagan, comedian Bob Hope, and Jordanian Prince Hassan bin Talal. Themed “Energy Turns the World” and formally called the Knoxville International Energy Exposition, the fair introduced the world’s first touch-screen computer displays, Cherry Coke, and the Sunsphere, a 26-story steel tower capped with a giant bronze globe. The structure endures as a city icon (the globe accessible by elevator). Though some critics panned the event as a flop—the New York Times wrote of its “desolate legacy” two years later, and in fact the profits added up to just $57—Knoxville is widely credited with hosting America’s last successful world’s fair.

1986: Dollywood makes Pigeon Forge’s dreams come true

Dolly Parton may be the single biggest force in Smokies tourism, and nowhere is her allure stronger than at Dollywood. In 1986, the Tennessee singer brought her star power home to Sevier County, with a rebranded theme park on the site of Pigeon Forge’s Silver Dollar City (where Rebel Railroad and Goldrush Junction had previously stood). Dollywood became an instant success, drawing 1.3 million visitors in its first year. Today said to be Tennessee’s most popular ticketed attraction, Dollywood spurred a commercial boom on the Parkway in Pigeon Forge, from the Titanic—“the world’s largest museum attraction”—to Dollywood’s own growing family of attractions, including Splash Country water park. When the 300-room DreamMore Resort opens this summer, Dollywood properties will employ more than 3,000 people. To celebrate the 30th season, Dollywood has announced the return of the Showcase of Stars concert, including Parton herself onstage, this August.

1992: The Tennessee Aquarium makes waves

During construction of the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, some locals derided it as “Jack’s fish tank,” in reference to Jack Lupton, the local philanthropist driving the project. When it opened in 1992 as the world’s largest freshwater aquarium, then Mayor Gene Roberts called the aquarium a “cathedral of conservation.” Whatever you call it, the riverfront attraction has transformed Chattanooga, returning focus to the city’s lifeblood, the snaking Tennessee River; leading to some $2 billion in new downtown investment; and making its own $77 million annual economic impact. The aquarium takes visitors on a freshwater journey from mountains to sea, starting with the Appalachian Cove Forest, where otters frolic in streams and waterfalls, birds chirp overhead, and reptiles lurk in hollow logs. 

1994: Asheville cheers its beer culture

Officially, “for love of beer and mountains” is a partnership between Asheville’s Highland Brewing Company and the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. Yet the phrase could also be considered a motto for Western North Carolina. It all started when Highland opened in 1994, helping to spark a craft beer revolution. Western North Carolina is now home to some 40 breweries, around half of those in Asheville alone, earning it the title “Beer City, USA” for several years. National craft breweries Sierra Nevada, Oskar Blues, and (under-construction) New Belgium have followed the buzz and opened Eastern outposts here. NPR recently called Asheville the “Napa Valley of beer.” Indeed, tourists can attend countless beer festivals, book a “brews cruise” (with a designated driver), and even take a yoga class in a taproom followed by a beer tasting. 

2010: Moonshine goes legit

White lightning. Mountain dew. An abomination. People have used a lot of words to describe moonshine over the years, but “mainstream” might be the least expected. Yet today the heritage spirit packs a potent economic punch, especially in Tennessee following its legalization in 2010. Ole Smoky Moonshine Distillery opened in Gatlinburg that same year and in its first five years has become America’s most visited distillery, offering countless free tastings of flavors like apple pie and lemon drop, adding an outpost in Pigeon Forge, and quadrupling its bottling capacity. At least 16 other moonshine makers have opened since, including several in Sevier County, such as Old Forge Distillery, which creates small-batch spirits with freshly ground grain from the Old Mill, a 19th-century gristmill. 

Spotlight on Culture : Selling folk traditions & high culture

1912: Pi Beta Phi Fraternity for Women sets up shop

With its founding of a one-room settlement school in Gatlinburg in 1912, the Pi Beta Phi Fraternity for Women brought education and the first medical clinic to this then remote part of the Smokies. In gratitude, students brought wood carvings, weavings, baskets, and other gifts made by their parents. In 1926 the women opened Arrowcraft Shop to sell such handcrafted wares to tourists and others passing through along the new Highway 71. Building on the success of this cottage craft movement, summer craft workshops debuted in 1945. By 1967 those workshops had grown into the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. The year-round destination for creative learning remains a driving force of arts and crafts in the Smokies, as well as “a source of universal pride,” as Sevier County newspaper editor Stan Voit wrote in the Mountain Press a couple of years ago. Fine regional crafts still attract travelers to Arrowcraft Shop, now operated by the Southern Highland Craft Guild. 

1927: Bristol sings a new tune

In July of 1927, the local newspaper in Bristol, Tennessee, ran a small ad about the Victor Talking Machine Company bringing its recording machine to town. For a dozen days, talent scout Ralph Peer recorded the Appalachian folk musicians who traveled to the Taylor-Christian Hat Company. Widely considered the “big bang of modern country music,” the recordings produced the world’s first country superstars, such as Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family; Johnny Cash famously called the Bristol sessions “the single most important event in the history of country music.” In 2014, the Birthplace of Country Music opened on the Virginia side of downtown Bristol. This May, the Smithsonian-affiliated museum released Orthophonic Joy: The 1927 Bristol Sessions Revisited. The tribute album breathes new life into those recordings thanks to top-of-the-line equipment and the voices of modern stars including Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, Marty Stuart, Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers, and Ashley Monroe.

1928: Asheville holds the first-ever folk festival

In 1928, the Asheville Chamber of Commerce recruited folk historian and musician Bascom Lamar Lunsford to bring Appalachian music and dance out of the mountains and coves and onto the stage of the annual Rhododendron Festival. Ballad singers, fiddlers, banjo pickers, and string bands entertained some 5,000 people at Pack Square. By 1930 the event had grown into the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival—the first ever folk festival in the United States. Still held the first weekend of August, “along about sundown,” Lunsford’s festival remains a summer fixture in downtown Asheville.

1928: The Southern Highland Craft Guild forms

In the 1890s, the simple gift of a handmade coverlet from a neighbor changed the life of Frances Goodrich, a religious missionary in Western North Carolina. In her words: “Here was a fine craft, dying out and desirable to revive.” Goodrich helped launch Southern Appalachia’s craft cottage revival of the early 20th century, along with women such as Lucy Morgan, the founder of Penland School of Crafts, and Marguerite Butler and Olive Dame Campbell, who started the John C. Campbell Folk School. Their shops and schools catered to tourists, with the profits helping to improve the lives of mountain people. Together they and others gathered in 1928 at Penland and brainstormed the idea for the Southern Highlands Craft Guild, which was officially chartered in 1930. Today the selective Guild represents nearly 1,000 craftspeople in 293 counties of 9 southeastern states. Operating six shops including the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway (milepost 294), the Guild also holds the juried Craft Fair of the Southern Highlands (established 1948) each July and October at the U.S. Cellular Center in downtown Asheville. Now as in the past, the Guild runs on tourism as well as encourages it.

1933: Black Mountain College shakes up art history

Black Mountain College only lasted 24 years—“gone before America even knew it existed,” as Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina’s poet laureate, once wrote. Yet its legacy will outlive us all. Founded in 1933 with a spirit of experimentalism and free thinking outside Black Mountain, North Carolina, this small unaccredited arts college “soon became known as a kind of Shangri-La for avant-garde art,” according to critic Carol Kino in the New York Times. European artists and intellectuals found sanctuary here amid the rise of Adolf Hitler, including Josef Albers and his textile-artist wife, Anni, who came here after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus School. Young artists and thinkers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly added to its mystique. The summer of 1948 stands out among Black Mountain College’s legendary summer sessions: Buckminster Fuller built his first geodesic dome, and John Cage emerged a controversial musical mastermind who, a few years later, staged the world’s first “happening” here in these mountains. But Black Mountain lives on beyond its reputation: Downtown Asheville’s Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center presents newly expanded exhibition space and archival material and hosts the (Re)Happening each spring, an explosion of art and ideas at Lake Eden, on the site of the college’s final campus.

1936: Brevard hits a high note

Since 1936, summers in Brevard have resounded with classical music. By 1955, what had started as a modest summer camp evolved into Brevard Music Center, now a seven-week stretch of 80-plus opera, chamber, and orchestra performances on a tranquil 180-acre wooded campus. Headlined by globally renowned soloists such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Joshua Bell, each season convenes more than 400 students and 65 professional musicians representing major symphonies from around the world. 

1950: Cherokee culture takes center stage

Since “Unto These Hills” debuted in 1950, Cherokee legends and stories have lit up the stage in a swirl of dramatic pageantry at the outdoor Mountainside Theater. Tourism expert Richard Starnes notes historical issues with “Unto These Hills”—the drama was not particularly accurate—but credits its spotlight on Cherokee culture as laying the foundation for initiatives such as the creation of the Oconaluftee Indian Village. Its popularity also encouraged other outdoor dramas, including Boone’s “Horn in the West” in 1952 and Virginia’s “Trail of Lonesome Pine,” which began in 1964.

1965: Bluegrass rocks its first multi-day festival

During warm months, Southern Appalachia hosts more bluegrass festivals than you can shake a banjo at, perhaps none with a wider draw than MerleFest. Held in late April on the campus of North Carolina’s Wilkes Community College, the four-day festival features more than 90 artists on 14 stages and some 80,000 attendees; along with the hit songs, it’s an economic chart topper to the tune of $10 million. But before flatpicking hero Doc Watson founded the festival in 1988 in memory of his late son, Eddy Merle Watson, Carlton Haney laid down the foundation by introducing the First Annual Roanoke Bluegrass Festival—aka the world’s inaugural multi-day outdoor bluegrass festival, held in 1965 on a horse farm in Fincastle, Virginia.

1973: The plot thickens in Jonesborough

Like any good yarn, things began simply enough—and made people hanker for more. In October 1973, some 60 folks sat around hay bales and wagons in Jonesborough, Tennessee, to hear some old Appalachian tales. Out of that early festival grew the International Storytelling Center, which has helped propel a nationwide revival in this time-honored tradition. These days, some 10,000 listeners pull up a chair each October for the National Storytelling Festival, which USA Today has called “the leading event of its kind in America.” 

Sports & Thrills: Getting your kicks, from the slots to the streams

1948: Car racing wins a bigger prize

Car racing runs deep in Appalachia. The sport’s early days often involved a devil-may-care bootlegger with a tricked-out car and a moonshine tank on these twisty mountain roads. Stock car tracks grew in popularity following World War II, which drove the 1948 founding of the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR). Guys like Junior Johnson of North Carolina made the transition from the stills to the tracks, winning 50 NASCAR wins in his 14-year driving career and becoming one of five inaugural Hall of Fame inductees. In 1961, the half-mile oval at Bristol Motor Speedway opened and hosted its first NASCAR Sprint Cup event. Today more than a million fans come to Bristol each year, with crowds of 200,000 at the March and August NASCAR races. Guided tours take visitors on a lap around the track to experience its high-banked turns.

1974: The University of Tennessee scores a slam dunk

When a 22-year-old Pat Summitt became head coach of women’s basketball at the University of Tennessee in 1974, nobody could have predicted just what a slam-dunk play it would prove for Knoxville. As steely-eyed Summitt helmed the Lady Vols’ rise to elite status, UT broke attendance records—first setting the world record for spectators at a women’s basketball game versus Texas in 1987, most recently topping that record with 25,653 people in a 2006 game against Connecticut. Some seven million spectators have cheered for (or against) Summitt during the past 30 years. In April 2012 she concluded her tenure—becoming head coach emeritus—with a record of 1,098 wins and 208 losses, making her the winningest coach in Division I history.

1996: Olympic-class whitewater rafting comes to the Ocoee

As the world’s gaze turned to Atlanta, Georgia, for the 1996 Summer Olympics, water lovers looked to the Ocoee River Gorge across the state line in Tennessee, marking the first-ever Olympic whitewater event on a natural river. Built as the host of the canoe, kayak, and slalom races, the Ocoee Whitewater Center now welcomes visitors to play in this section of the river that was carefully modified to enhance its rapids. The Ocoee has surged in popularity and has become, according to 2014 data by the American Outdoors Association, the nation’s most visited whitewater river.

1997: Harrah’s Cherokee Casino gambles big

Some $93 million and endless controversy built the shiny Vegas outpost in the Smokies known as Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort, which the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation opened in 1997 on the Qualla Boundary in Western North Carolina. With 1,100 hotel rooms, 190,000 square feet of gaming, 3,800 slot machines, and more than 100 tables for blackjack and other games, it all adds up to North Carolina’s largest tourist attraction, with more than 3.5 million visitors spending roughly $156.6 million each year in Cherokee. Next up: Harrah’s Cherokee Valley River Casino & Hotel is set to open this summer near Murphy, North Carolina.

2011: Cherokee lands a big one

In 2011, the U.S. National Fly Fishing Championship came to the pristine streams of Cherokee’s Tribal Waters, marking the first time the national event was held in the Southeast. 

Now more than ever before, anglers are taking the bait. Each year, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Fisheries and Wildlife Management stocks its 30 miles of freestone streams with some 400,000 trout and hosts several annual tagged tournaments for amateurs and professionals, including the elite Rumble in the Rhododendron each fall. The new Fly Fishing Museum of the Southern Appalachians in Cherokee also hopes to hook more fans.

Life Imitates art: Truth is stranger than fiction

1954: Davy Crockett brings the frontier to the Smokies

Growing up in the 1950s meant one near absolute: gunning for Davy Crockett. Filmed in color at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1954, Disneyland’s miniseries proved a smash hit, drawing an estimated 40 million viewers and throwing fuel in the fire for mid-century America’s love for all things frontier. In 1957, the Tweetsie Railroad theme park opened near Blowing Rock, a year later building on the craze with its addition of a frontier town and Wild West theme. The park’s success convinced owner Grover Robbins. Jr. to build Rebel Railroad in Pigeon Forge. In 1961, Maggie Valley’s Ghost Town In the Sky got in the spirit. In its prime, the theme park brought in more than 600,000 annual visitors.

1958: Thunder Road rolls through the Tail of the Dragon

With 318 curves in 11 miles, US 129 seems to mimic the twists of a dragon’s tail. In the 1958 movie Thunder Road, the cars are the ones breathing fire as a moonshine runner outraces revenuers along this winding pass through the mountains of Tennessee. The cult classic helped popularize the Tail of the Dragon, as US 129 is commonly known, and today roars with motorcyclists and other adrenaline junkies. 

1972: Deliverance delivers more than lame punchlines

With its hillbilly portrayals and brutal violence, the 1972 movie Deliverance dealt a serious blow to the reputation of the people of Appalachia, especially in the mountains of northern Georgia where filming took place. But for all the cheap shots fired by Hollywood, the final laugh goes to the whitewater rafting industry of Southern Appalachia. Movie scenes along the scenic Chattooga River helped create a $20 million outdoor sports industry based on these rapids, attracting a quarter of a million rafters each year and sending out ripple effects throughout the Southeast. Also in 1972, as whitewater rafting began to hit the mainstream, the Nantahala Outdoor Center opened in Bryson City, with Class III and IV rapids.

The Power of a Stunt: What’s the big idea?

1886: Tallulah Falls walks the line

If maintaining tourism success is like walking a tightrope, nowhere is that truer than in northeastern Georgia. With its six cascades and countless smaller falls, the dramatic Tallulah Gorge became known as the Niagara of the South and as a playground for 19th-century travelers here at the railroad’s northern terminus. During its heyday, local businessman W. D. Young put the “stunt” in publicity stunt when he hired an aerialist who went by the name of Professor Leon to cross the gorge and bring attention to his new hotel. More than 5,000 curious onlookers showed up to witness the feat, but, in the years to follow, the bottom fell out from under Tallulah’s tourism industry. In 1970, things started looking up—literally. Local tourism officials recruited Carl Wallenda of the infamous Flying Wallenda family to give the gorge another go. Some 35,000 spectators lined the rim to watch Wallenda’s daring feat, which he later called the most dangerous thing he’d ever done, as well as the most beautiful. From June 19 to 28, Tallulah Gorge, now a state park, will celebrate the 45th anniversary of Wallenda’s “skywalk” with ten days of concerts and other festivities.

1932: Rock City kicks off a barnstorming tour

In an 1823 diary entry, missionary Daniel S. Butrick wrote of a “citadel of rocks” and boulders atop northwestern Georgia’s Lookout Mountain, arranged in such a way “as to afford streets and lanes.” Nineteenth-century sightseers that followed nicknamed the unique rock formations “Rock City.” But Garnet and Frieda Carter are the enterprising duo who made the place a household name. After four years of Frieda blazing paths through the wilderness, trailing a string behind her and positioning her beloved German gnomes along the way, Rock City Gardens opened to the public in 1932. Considering the mountain outside Chattanooga was far from a roadside attraction, things got off to a slow start. In one of the 20th century’s most inspired marketing moves, Garnet Carter commissioned a painter, Clark Byers, to crisscross the country’s highways and offer to paint farmers’ barns if he could emblazon the roof with a simple message: “See Rock City.” Over the course of the next three decades, Byers and his crew painted nearly 900 barns, scattered from Michigan to Texas, along the “snowbird’s route” to Florida. The marketing campaign worked; today more than half a million visitors see Rock City.

1968: Bavaria pops up in Georgia

Striking gold once is lucky enough, but twice? The northern Georgia town of Helen sprang up amid the 1829 gold rush, but, by the middle of the 20th century, its fortunes had long since run out. Desperate for a new start in 1968, town members hatched an idea to raise Helen out of obscurity. Inspired by time he had spent stationed in the Bavarian Alps, local artist John Kollack presented watercolor sketches that reimagined the town as an alpine village. The rest, as they say, is history. Helen’s Bavarian face-lift attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors here along the Chattahoochee River.

Laws of Attraction

We all get by with a little help from our friends. Over the years, key federal legislation has set the groundwork for major tourism gains.

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