11 Underappreciated Towns To Visit In North Carolina
Everyone in North Carolina already knows about Blowing Rock and Mayberry. The towns below are the ones you drive past on the way to somewhere else, or have vaguely heard of and never stopped in, and several of them are better than the places you were headed. They run west to east, from a Jackson County seat under the Parkway to a fishing town at the mouth of the Cape Fear, and every one of them is worth turning off for.
One note before the western stops. Helene came through in September 2024 and the mountains are still putting themselves back together, so check road, trail, and Parkway access before you commit to a route out there.
Sylva
The old Jackson County courthouse, an hour east of the Smokies, sits at the top of a flight of 107 steps looking straight down Main Street, and that view is the single most photographed thing in the western counties that is not a waterfall. The building is a library now. Climb it anyway.
Main Street below has become a genuinely good bar and bookshop run, with Innovation Brewing and City Lights Bookstore anchoring either end. The Jackson County Green Energy Park is the odd one: it captures methane off the old landfill and pipes it to glassblowers and blacksmiths who work in studios on the site, and you can watch them. Waterrock Knob is fifteen minutes up the Blue Ridge Parkway at 5,820 feet, and the Tuckasegee runs right through town for anyone who would rather float than climb.
Brevard
Transylvania County claims more than 250 waterfalls, which is why Brevard goes by the Land of Waterfalls, and the white squirrels running around downtown are descended from a carnival truck that overturned in Florida in the 1940s. Locals take both facts seriously.
Looking Glass Falls drops 60 feet about eight miles up US 276 and you can see it from the road. Sliding Rock is the natural 60-foot flume in the same corridor with a lifeguard on duty in summer, which tells you how many people use it. DuPont State Recreational Forest holds Triple Falls and High Falls, both of which turned up in The Hunger Games. In town, the Brevard Music Center runs a serious summer festival and has since 1936.
Black Mountain
Town Hardware on Cherry Street still sells cast iron, seed packets, and hardware by the individual screw out of wooden bins, and it has been doing it since 1959. Black Mountain grew up around the railroad in the 1880s as a summer escape, and the scale of the downtown has not changed much since.
The town took Helene hard and the recovery is ongoing, so this is one to visit rather than read about. Andrews Geyser, eight miles east at Old Fort, is not a geyser at all but a gravity-fed fountain built by the railroad in 1885 that throws water about 80 feet. Catawba Falls and the trails in the Swannanoa valley have been through a great deal since the storm; check what has reopened before you drive out.
Morganton
Morganton punches above its weight on music, which is not what you expect from a Blue Ridge gateway of 17,000 people. The Historic Burke County Courthouse anchors a square that fills up for the summer concert series, and the CoMMA performing arts centre books touring acts most towns this size never see.
South Mountains State Park is the draw outside town, with an 80-foot waterfall at High Shoals Falls reached by a climb up a staircase beside the water. The Catawba River Greenway runs along the river for walking and riding. Burke County also holds the North Carolina School for the Deaf, opened in 1894, and the town has been a Blue Ridge gateway since the 18th century without ever charging gateway prices.
Elkin
Elkin sits at the top of the Yadkin Valley, the state's oldest designated wine region, and more than forty vineyards work the hills within a half-hour of the courthouse. The Elkin and Alleghany Railroad and the textile mills built the place; the vineyards are keeping it going.
The Mountains-to-Sea Trail runs through downtown, which not many towns can say, and the Elkin Valley Trails Association has built out a good network around it. Stone Mountain State Park is twenty minutes north, where a 600-foot granite dome rises out of the forest and climbers work routes on the face while everyone else walks to the falls. Horne Creek Living Historical Farm, about 25 miles east near Pinnacle, works a 1900-era Piedmont farm with heirloom apple orchards.
Hillsborough
Hillsborough has more working novelists per square mile than anywhere else in the state. Allan Gurganus, Lee Smith, Randall Kenan, and Michael Malone all landed here, and the town leans into it with a literary festival and a bookshop that takes itself seriously. For a town of 9,600 that is a strange concentration, and the bookshop on Churton Street has the signed stock to prove it.
Founded in 1754, the town hosted the 1788 constitutional convention that refused to ratify without a bill of rights, and the colonial and Federal building stock along King and Churton Streets survived largely intact. Ayr Mount is the 1815 Federal house to tour, with the Poet's Walk looping through the grounds down to the Eno. Occoneechee Mountain is the highest point in Orange County at 867 feet and takes about an hour to walk. Bennett Place, where Johnston surrendered the largest Confederate force of the war, is fifteen minutes east in Durham.
Edenton
In October 1774, fifty-one women in Edenton signed a public agreement to stop buying British tea. The Edenton Tea Party was one of the earliest organised political actions by women in the colonies, and it got them mocked in the London papers, which is how you know it landed.
The town was North Carolina's colonial capital and sits on Albemarle Sound with a waterfront that has never been overbuilt. The 1767 Chowan County Courthouse is the finest Georgian courthouse in the South and still in use. The Roanoke River Lighthouse, a screwpile moved back to the harbour, is one of the last of its kind anywhere. Broad Street runs down to the water past brick storefronts, and the whole historic district is walkable in a morning.
Bath
Bath is the oldest town in North Carolina, incorporated in 1705, and roughly 250 people live there. Blackbeard kept a house here and received a royal pardon from the governor before going back to piracy, which the state historic site covers without romanticising it too much.
St. Thomas Episcopal is the oldest church building in the state, finished in 1734 and still holding services. The Palmer-Marsh House dates to 1751. The whole place takes an hour to walk and sits on Bath Creek off the Pamlico, which means the water views are the kind you get in a town that never grew. Go on a weekday and you may have it to yourself.
Washington
Little Washington got the name first. The town adopted it in 1776 while the general was still fighting the war, making it the first place in the country named for George Washington, and locals have been correcting people about it ever since.
The waterfront on the Pamlico is the whole appeal, with a boardwalk, working docks, and a promenade that fills up at sunset. The North Carolina Estuarium is the only museum in the country devoted entirely to an estuary system, which is a strange and good thing to find in a town of 9,700. St. Peter's Episcopal is among the oldest churches in the state, and the Riverwalk Gallery shows regional work. Goose Creek State Park is fifteen minutes east for cypress swamp, Spanish moss, and a good cross-section of the state's wildlife.
Beaufort
Wild horses graze on the island directly across the channel from the restaurants on Front Street, and you can watch them from your table. The Rachel Carson Reserve holds a feral herd on Carrot Island, reachable by a short ferry, and the whole thing costs almost nothing.
Beaufort is North Carolina's third-oldest town, settled in 1709, and Blackbeard ran the Queen Anne's Revenge aground just off here in 1718. The North Carolina Maritime Museum downtown holds the artefacts they have been pulling off that wreck for three decades, and admission is free. The Old Burying Ground under the live oaks is worth half an hour. Cape Lookout and its diagonally striped lighthouse are a ferry ride out.
Southport
Southport is where the Cape Fear River meets the ocean, which means container ships pass close enough to the waterfront that you stop talking to watch them. Film crews have used the place so often that the locals no longer look up.
Fort Johnston dates to the 1740s and the garrison is why the town exists; the visitor centre covers it. The North Carolina Maritime Museum at Southport handles piracy, shipwrecks, and the commercial fishing that still works out of here. The ferry to Bald Head Island runs from the docks, and the island allows no cars, only golf carts. Live oaks lean over the residential streets between the waterfront and downtown, which is the part that gets photographed.
How To Actually Do This
These eleven split into three trips rather than one. Sylva, Brevard, Black Mountain, and Morganton sit along the western corridor within about ninety minutes of each other, and that is the run to make once you have checked what Helene left open. Elkin and Hillsborough are the Piedmont stops, both close enough to the interstate to fold into a drive you were making anyway.
The coast is the sleeper. Edenton, Bath, Washington, Beaufort, and Southport are all genuinely old towns on genuinely quiet water, and they run down the coast in that order, which makes a solid four-day loop if you have the time. Bath takes an hour and Beaufort takes two days. Go in the shoulder season and you will have most of them largely to yourself.
