10 Prettiest Small Towns In The Southern United States

The South does pretty in a lot of registers. There is a Bavarian village in the Georgia mountains, a beach where wild Spanish horses still outnumber the traffic, and a Mississippi courthouse square that has stood in for half of Hollywood's version of the small-town South. These ten towns run from the Blue Ridge to the Outer Banks, and each one has a genuine reason to look twice, not just a nice waterfall and a gift shop. Here they are, and what makes each one worth the stop.

Helen, Georgia

Here is the twist about Helen: it is not an old German town, it just plays one very convincingly. When logging and mining dried up in 1969, a local artist named John Kollock redrew the whole place as a Bavarian alpine village, cobblestones, gingerbread trim, and all, and it worked so well that roughly two million people a year now show up for it. You can tube down the Chattahoochee River, zipline the treetops at Unicoi, or just wander the shops, one of which holds North America's largest display of Black Forest cuckoo clocks. It is a themed town that fully committed, set deep in the Georgia Blue Ridge, and it pulls the look off with real conviction.

Corolla, North Carolina

Corolla sits at the far north end of the Outer Banks, where the paved road quits and the beach becomes the road. Its most famous residents are the Corolla wild horses, Colonial Spanish Mustangs that have roamed these barrier islands for some 400 years and are now North Carolina's official state horse. They live up on the roadless 4x4 beaches, so seeing them means airing down the tires and driving onto the sand, and getting no closer than 50 feet, which is the law. Between horse-spotting, there is Corolla Beach itself, boat charters, the Currituck Beach Lighthouse, and the Whalehead, a 1920s Art Nouveau mansion that locals swear is haunted. It is the wild end of the North Carolina coast, and better for it.

Staunton, Virginia

Staunton has a party trick most cities twice its size cannot match: the Blackfriars Playhouse, the only re-creation anywhere of Shakespeare's indoor theatre, where the plays run year-round under candlelight with the actors and audience sharing the same lamps, exactly as they did in 1608. It is also the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson, whose presidential library and boyhood home sit downtown alongside the Frontier Culture Museum, a living-history spread of relocated farmsteads. The compact downtown is full of Victorian storefronts worth an afternoon, and when you want air, the Shenandoah Valley is right there. Not bad for a Virginia town of about 25,000.

Yorktown, Virginia

Yorktown is where the American Revolution effectively ended: in 1781, Washington's forces and their French allies cornered Cornwallis here, and his surrender broke the war. That history is the whole draw, and it is handled well, from the Yorktown Battlefield to the American Revolution Museum, which trades glass-case exhibits for a re-created Continental Army encampment and a working Revolution-era farm. The town anchors one corner of Virginia's "Historic Triangle" with Williamsburg and Jamestown. When you have had enough of the 18th century, Yorktown Beach sits right on the York River, and Riverwalk Landing handles lunch with a water view. It is a battlefield you can swim next to.

Gadsden, Alabama

The centerpiece of Gadsden is Noccalula Falls, a 90-foot waterfall that drops straight into a ravine right at the edge of town, with a bronze statue of the Cherokee maiden of its origin legend standing at the lip. The surrounding park has a gorge trail, botanical gardens, and a pioneer village, so the falls are the start rather than the whole visit. Downtown keeps a walkable strip of historic storefronts and the Gadsden Museum of Art, and Black Creek is the spot if you want to throw a fly line. It is less than an hour from Birmingham but does not feel remotely like a suburb of it, which is the appeal of this corner of Alabama.

Cherokee, North Carolina

Cherokee is the home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the descendants of those who stayed in these mountains rather than walk the Trail of Tears, and it sits right at the southern gateway to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Start at the Museum of the Cherokee People, which tells that history straight, then work off the sitting with a hike to Mingo Falls, one of the tallest waterfalls in the Southern Appalachians, or a run down the Fire Mountain Trails. Harrah's Cherokee is the big glossy casino at the center of it all, if that is your speed. It is a rare town where a national park, a living culture, and a Vegas-style resort all share one main road.

Leiper's Fork, Tennessee

Leiper's Fork is a village of a few hundred people just off the Natchez Trace, and it punches absurdly above its weight because a lot of Nashville's music world quietly keeps places out here. The result is a tiny Main Street with serious art galleries, real antique stores, and live pickin' sessions that pull talent no town this size has any business hosting. Fox and Locke, the old general-store-turned-music-room, is the heart of it, and the calendar fills out with events like ForkFest and a genuinely beloved Christmas parade. Come for a quiet afternoon of browsing; stay because someone excellent is playing that night. It is the most low-key famous small town in Tennessee.

Townsend, Tennessee

Townsend markets itself as "the peaceful side of the Smokies," and for once the slogan is accurate. While Gatlinburg handles the crowds and the pancake houses, Townsend keeps a quiet back door into the most-visited national park in the country, opening straight onto Cades Cove, the broad valley of old homesteads and churches where black bears and deer wander the loop road. Spring brings the wildflowers and fall brings the color, but the tubing on the Little River is a summer institution. The town rounds out the year with festivals for pottery, woodcarving, hot-air balloons, and even a bicycle bash. It is the Smokies with the volume turned down.

Ellijay, Georgia

Ellijay is Georgia's apple town, and it does not undersell it: the surrounding orchards make this the center of the state's apple country, and every October the Georgia Apple Festival takes over. Show up in fall and you can pick your own at R and A Orchards, work through the ciders at places like Reece's, and drive roads lit up with color in the north Georgia mountains. The rest of the year holds its own too, with trout streams, hiking, and a walkable old downtown square. It is a mountain town organized around a single fruit, and honestly all the better for having a theme.

Canton, Mississippi

You have probably seen Canton without knowing it. Its well-preserved Courthouse Square has doubled as the small-town South in a string of films, "A Time to Kill," "My Dog Skip," and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" among them, and the town leaned into it by opening not one but two movie museums. It also throws itself fully into the holidays as the self-styled "most festive Christmas town in Mississippi," when the whole square goes up in lights for the Canton Christmas Festival. The rest of the year, the antique shops around the square do the heavy lifting. It is a real town that happens to look exactly like the movie version of one.

The Prettiest Corners of the South

What ties these ten together is that not one of them is generic. Helen invented a whole identity; Corolla shares its beach with wild horses; Staunton hosts Shakespeare by candlelight; Canton keeps getting cast as everywhere else. The scenery is the easy part in the South. The reason these towns stick is that each one has something specific and slightly improbable going on, and any of them is worth pointing the car toward for a weekend.