10 North Carolina Small Towns With Unmatched Friendliness
Southport has thrown the same Fourth of July party for more than 200 years and still waves everybody onto the porch. Edenton was welcoming company onto its brick streets before North Carolina was a state. Beaufort has answered the door since 1713. In these ten towns, friendliness is not the slogan on the water tower; it is the oldest local habit there is, kept up at barbecue fundraisers, apple parades, and front porches that treat strangers as a rumor. None of them sits more than a tank of gas from your driveway, and every one has had generations to perfect the welcome.
Beaufort
Three hours east of the Triangle, where Highway 70 finally runs out of hurry, Beaufort has been taking people in since 1713, which makes it the third-oldest town in the state. It throws a Pirate Invasion every year because it has the receipts: Blackbeard ran the Queen Anne's Revenge aground at Beaufort Inlet in 1718, and the wreck's cannons sit in the North Carolina Maritime Museum on Front Street. During the festival, mock battles break out on the water and a town of 5,000 cheerfully absorbs half the coast.
The rest of the year runs at harbor speed. The wild horses of the Rachel Carson Reserve graze on Carrot Island in plain view of the boardwalk, volunteers at the Harvey W. Smith Watercraft Center will teach you wooden boatbuilding if you stand still long enough, and the whole dock ends up in one conversation, usually about whether the horses came down to the water today. Budget Travel once named this America's Coolest Small Town. The horses were not consulted and remain unbothered.
Edenton
Way up on the Albemarle, past where most of the state ever bothers to drive, sits the town that started it all: Edenton, your first colonial capital. The women here organized the Edenton Tea Party in 1774, when Penelope Barker and 51 neighbors staged one of the first organized political actions by women in American history, and Barker's house now serves as the town's welcome center. Resistance, then hospitality, in the same front parlor. That is about as North Carolina as a building gets.
The 1886 Roanoke River Lighthouse sits in the harbor, the 1767 Chowan County Courthouse still anchors Broad Street, and the cypress trees stand out in the Sound the way they have for centuries. Come for the Fourth of July golf cart parade and the watermelon-eating contests, or December's Candlelight Tour. A town of 4,500 learns your name fast, and Edenton has had three hundred years of practice.
Manteo
Everybody races across the causeway for the beaches and forgets Manteo is the best porch on the Outer Banks. This island village has been putting on a show for the rest of the state, literally, since 1937: The Lost Colony, the nation's longest-running outdoor symphonic drama, retells Roanoke's great mystery every summer at the Waterside Theatre, with generations of Dare County families in the cast. You probably saw it on a school trip. Your kids should too.
The rest earns the detour off the bypass: costumed crews working the decks of the Elizabeth II at Roanoke Island Festival Park, sharks at the aquarium, the little Roanoke Marshes Lighthouse at the end of the boardwalk. From March through November, First Friday fills the brick sidewalks with music and open shop doors, and October's Bluegrass Island festival turns the whole village into one string band. Beach traffic optional.
Southport
Forty-five minutes south of Wilmington, where the Cape Fear meets the sea, Southport hosts the official North Carolina Fourth of July Festival, and has for more than 200 years. Forty to fifty thousand people descend on a town of 4,300 every summer, and Southport just waves everybody onto the porch and makes it work. If you have only seen those oak-draped streets in the movies, that is forgivable; Hollywood borrows this Main Street every time it needs a perfect one.
Off-season is the local secret. The pier and Riverwalk belong to anglers and slow walkers, the Fort Johnston-Southport Museum covers the state's oldest fort site with a scavenger hunt that keeps the kids honest, and Springfest opens the warm months with music in the streets. The ferry to Fort Fisher runs right past the mouth of the river, which is the cheapest boat tour in the state.
Hillsborough
Fifteen minutes from Durham, Hillsborough is the Triangle's backyard that half the Triangle still hasn't met. Its priorities are printed on the festival calendar: Hog Day, the barbecue blowout the town has thrown for more than 40 years, sends its proceeds straight to local schools and nonprofits, so every plate of pulled pork is a donation with slaw. December's Holiday Parade rolls Santa and the cheerleaders past shops that stay open late, and the restored 1838 Colonial Inn watches over it all like it has seen every parade since Reconstruction, because it roughly has.
This is also the town where your favorite North Carolina novelist probably lives; Hillsborough's writers' colony is the worst-kept literary secret in the South, and the coffee shops double as their offices. Walk the Riverwalk where it follows the Eno through downtown, then climb Occoneechee Mountain, the highest point between here and the coast, and look back at a town that figured out how to grow without letting go.
Mount Airy
You grew up knowing this one, even if you have never made the drive 40 minutes northwest of Winston. Mount Airy is Andy Griffith's hometown and the blueprint for Mayberry, and it leans in with both hands: replica squad cars run tours from the old jail, the Andy Griffith Museum holds the memorabilia, and Mayberry Days each September fills Main Street with a parade and every tribute character you remember. Snappy Lunch, the only real business Andy ever named on the show, still serves the pork chop sandwich to a line out the door, and the line is part of the experience.
The town of 10,500 holds up without the reruns, too. The Bluegrass & Old-Time Fiddlers Convention has pulled pickers from everywhere since 1972, and the granite under your feet comes from the world's largest open-face quarry, right at the edge of town. Mayberry was fiction. The waving, as it turns out, was documentary.
Hendersonville
Half an hour south of Asheville, Hendersonville is the Apple Capital of North Carolina, and if you have ever fought for parking on Labor Day weekend you know why: the North Carolina Apple Festival draws a crowd pushing 250,000, with 60,000 of them staying for the King Apple Parade, all in a town of 15,600. That math should not work. Hendersonville makes it work every single year, then goes back to Monday like nothing happened.
Between harvests, the summer Music on Main series keeps the gathering habit weekly, and the painted Bearfootin' bears along the curving Main Street get decorated by local artists and auctioned off each fall for area charities, which makes them the only public art in the state with a philanthropy record. The Heritage Museum in the 1905 courthouse covers the mountain history. The orchards up Highway 64 cover dessert.
Black Mountain
Fifteen minutes east of Asheville on I-40, Black Mountain calls itself the Front Porch of Western North Carolina and furnishes accordingly: oversized rocking chairs stand on the downtown corners for anyone who wants to sit a spell and talk, and somebody always does. August brings the Sourwood Festival, free and pet-friendly, when 30,000 people turn up for honey tastings and live bee demonstrations in honor of the local sourwood harvest, the mountain crop you already keep on a biscuit shelf.
December answers with Holly Jolly, when Santa works the sidewalks and the shops compete over Christmas windows. The quiet months belong to Lake Tomahawk, a small man-made lake ringed by a walking path in a 16-acre park at the center of town, with free tennis and pickleball beside it, and to the Pisgah National Forest trails waiting past the ridgeline. The rocking chairs stay out all year. So does the habit.
Brevard
Forty-five minutes southwest of Asheville, Brevard elected a mascot nobody can own: the white squirrel. The town's famous colony gets three days of street festival every spring at White Squirrel Weekend, complete with live music and an artisan market whose proceeds feed a local food ministry. A town that organizes itself around a squirrel and a good cause has its priorities in working order.
Summer belongs to the Brevard Music Center, whose festival fills the mountain air with dozens of concerts while half the town claims the lawn seats, and to the water: Transylvania County is the Land of Waterfalls, more than 250 of them, and at Sliding Rock in Pisgah you will stand in line with strangers of every age to ride a 60-foot natural rock slide into water cold enough to make the whole line friends. Shared shivering is excellent social glue. It always has been.
Waynesville
Thirty-five minutes west of Asheville, Waynesville's friendliness is literally state policy: this is the home of Folkmoot, North Carolina's official international folk festival, which has been putting dancers and musicians from around the world on local stages, and in local guest rooms, every summer since 1984. Haywood County hosts the planet, then goes to the Apple Harvest Festival in October with 20,000 of its closest friends. The downtown keeps getting ranked among the best Main Streets in America, and the monthly First Friday keeps it earning the title.
You know the setting even if you have not stopped: Lake Junaluska glinting beside the highway, the Blue Ridge Parkway entrance minutes away on its 469-mile run between Shenandoah and the Smokies through the Appalachians. Check Parkway access before you drive up; the views, unlike the gates, are open unconditionally.
One County Over, Wherever You Are
None of this is tourism-board talk, and you know it, because you have been in those Apple Festival crowds and those Sliding Rock lines. These ten towns welcome at a scale that should not work, Southport absorbing ten times its population for a parade, Hendersonville a quarter million for apples, Waynesville the whole world for a folk dance, and they stay themselves while doing it, with Blackbeard's wreck in Beaufort, a tea party's worth of history in Edenton, and white squirrels in Brevard. The friendliest places in this state have never been the big ones. They are the ones a tank of gas away, holding your spot on the porch.
