Some 20 miles north on the parkway lies the resort village of Little Switzerland, rich in vacation homes plus several lodges for visitors. Elisha Mitchell, a college professor who was the first to prove the peak was higher than New Hampshire's Mt. Beside the tower on the summit lies the grave of Dr. The drive (and the dance) are worth the effort on a clear day, for from this highest point in the East one can see 360 degrees of Appalachian scenery. Mitchell proves annually to thousands that the higher you go, the colder it gets: all summer one can see visitors in T‐shirts and shorts performing strange little dances in an effort to keep warm. Mitchell State Park, where one can turn off and drive to an observation tower 6,684 feet above sea level. There is a visitors’ center, and there are trails to hike from which to view the blossoming rhododendrons and mountain laurel.įrom Craggy Gardens the parkway climbs to Mt. Some 20 miles from town is Craggy Gardens, an area where nature has gathered over 1,500 species of wild flowers that put forth a blaze of color beginning in the early summer. Outside Asheville, the Blue Ridge Parkway starts to climb into mountain country. The houseĬontains its original furniture-and one room is filled with furnishings from Wolfe's New York City apartment. It's at 48 Spruce Street admission, $1 for adults and 50 cents for children. But Wolfe is remembered with fondness now, and his home-'Dixieland” in his fiction-is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 9 A.M'o 5 P.M., andįrom 1 to 5 on Sunday. The book didn't go over too well in Asheville for years there wasn't a copy to be found in the public library. Wolfe later wrote about both of them in “Look Homeward, Angel,” his first novel. He spent his boyhood in boarding house owned by his mother, while his father, who lived in a sepa‐ rate house, worked in downtown Asheville as a stonecutter. Thomas Wolfe was born in 1900 in Asheville. The admission fee, $6 for adults and $4 for children, buys a look at how the other. 25, the estate is open daily except New Year's Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. George Vanderbilt died in 1914, and no one has lived in the house sinceġ930. Pruned bushes take the shape of animals, 5,000 roses gladden a summer day and one of the finer English gardens in America awaits inspection. Over by Napoleon while cooling his heels in exile. On display are such treasures as a Karl Bitter Fountain, 16th‐century Flemish tapestries and a chess set pondered Visitors roam around the rooms open to the public without benefit of guides, though guidebooks can be purchased. Then the house emerges-all 255 rooms of it. You begin to get an idea of the scale of the place while motoring up a threemile‐long driveway. He employed over 1,000 people and put them to work for five years building what became the world's largest private house-Biltmore. In 1883 George Vanderbilt began buying property and assembling an estate that would total 230 square miles. The boom came when the railroad hit town in the 1880's husbands worked in the cities during the week, and on weekends joined their families in newly built summer houses. Asheville has been at‐ tracting visitors since the 1820's, when people in the lowlands of Charleston or Charlotte discovered that a trip to the mountains was the best thing to do while waiting on the invention of air‐conditioning. Here one can bid farewell to interstate highways and traffic jams, and not lay eyes on another McDonald's until reaching Boone. The scenery is gratifying but by never venturing from the parkway visitors experience only a fraction of the charms of western North Carolina.Īsheville, the principal city of the region, is a good place to start. Millions of people travel the road every year, especially when the flowers come out in early summer and the leaves change in the fall. The secret lies in knowing when to get off the parkway. To drive it nonstop takes only three hours, but to do real justice to the sights and activities offered along the way could take closer to a week. That very best section I have in mind is a 100‐mile stretch in North Carolina from Asheville to Boone. While passing through North Carolina, the road roughly parallels the Tennessee border. The parkway runs from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee. And trying to pick the best section of is sheer folly-unless you're sure am. Anyone who'd claim he knew the most scenic road in the eastern United States-I mean, of course, the Blue Ridge Parkway-is going out on a limb.
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