12 Small Towns in North Carolina to Visit for a Weekend Getaway

Twelve weekends. Twelve towns. Wake Forest gave up its college in 1956 and kept the campus. Beaufort still has Blackbeard's flagship at the bottom of the inlet, identified in 1996 and excavated artifact by artifact ever since. Brevard has more than 250 waterfalls inside Pisgah National Forest and a downtown population of partial-albino white squirrels descended from a 1949 release. Edenton has Penelope Barker, who in 1774 organized fifty-one women to sign a resolution refusing British tea and got mocked in the London papers for her trouble. None of the twelve is interchangeable with any of the others.

Wake Forest

The original Wake Forest College campus sits at the north end of South Main, in continuous use since 1834. The college left for Winston-Salem in 1956 to be closer to Reynolds Foundation money. The buildings stayed. Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary moved in. The quad still feels like a college quad. same magnolias, same brick walks, same hush at 7am. just a different denomination running the dorms. Falls Lake State Recreation Area sits 10 miles east with swimming beaches, boat ramps, and trail miles, the standard escape from Raleigh on a hot weekend. The Wake Forest Historical Museum operates out of the 1820 Calvin Jones House, named for the doctor who donated the land for the college in the first place. Joyner Park west of downtown holds the largest crepe myrtle collection in the South, which means in late June it goes radioactive pink and people drive in to take pictures. Sixteen miles from Raleigh. The difference shows by the second cup of coffee.

Blowing Rock

Named for a real outcrop. The wind funnels up the Johns River Gorge so hard that light objects thrown off the cliff get pushed back at the thrower. Cherokee legend says a chief's daughter jumped and the wind returned her to her father. the only such inverted cliff legend in the eastern US, and it happens to be aerodynamically plausible. The town sits at 3,500 feet on the Blue Ridge plateau, eight miles south of Boone. The Blowing Rock Art and History Museum runs rotating regional collections. Moses H. Cone Memorial Park on the Blue Ridge Parkway covers 3,500 acres of carriage roads built for the Cone Mills textile family. a working denim fortune in the early 1900s, now open to anyone with hiking boots or a horse. Grandfather Mountain is 12 miles north with the Mile-High Swinging Bridge and a small wildlife habitat where you can stand 15 feet from a black bear in a chain-link enclosure and reconsider your relationship to the food chain. The Blowing Rock itself charges admission. Still worth it for the wind.

Brevard

Transylvania County advertises more than 250 named waterfalls. Most sit inside Pisgah National Forest, which wraps the town on three sides like a green parenthesis. Sliding Rock, eight miles north on Route 276, drops down a 60-foot granite slope into a chilly pool. Forest Service lifeguards in summer. Small admission fee. Bring something to dry off with. the water is colder than you expect. Looking Glass Falls drops 60 feet straight down right beside the same road, no hike required, the kind of view that justifies a roadside pull-off and twenty minutes you didn't plan on. Brevard Music Center runs a seven-week summer festival from June into August with faculty pulled from major orchestras: cellists who principal at the New York Philharmonic on regular weeks, teaching teenagers on this one. Brevard College anchors Main Street. And then there are the white squirrels. partial albinos, descended from a small breeding pair released in 1949 by the Mull family, still skittering across power lines downtown. Locals will point them out to you. Tourists feed them. Don't feed them. They're squirrels.

Beaufort

Pronounce it BOH-fert, never BYOO-fert (that's the one in South Carolina, and the locals here will correct you). Settled 1709. Incorporated 1722. The third-oldest town in the state. Front Street runs along Taylor's Creek across from Carrot Island, where wild horses graze in plain sight of the boardwalk while you eat shrimp. They are descended from Spanish mustangs that swam ashore from shipwrecks centuries ago, and nobody manages them. They manage themselves. The North Carolina Maritime Museum holds the largest collection of artifacts from the Queen Anne's Revenge. Blackbeard's flagship, identified in 1996 in Beaufort Inlet a mile offshore. Excavation continues. Over 400,000 artifacts have come up so far, including cannons that still bear powder residue. The Old Burying Ground, established 1709, holds a girl reportedly shipped home from England in a barrel of rum because her mother had promised to bring her back. The headstone says: "Little girl in rum cask." Island Express Ferry runs trips to Cape Lookout for the diagonal-striped lighthouse and the Shackleford Banks horses. The Inn on Turner, built 1866, handles the lodging.

Hendersonville

Twenty miles south of Asheville. Apple country. Henderson County is the seventh-largest apple-producing county in the country, with about 200 commercial orchards in the surrounding hills. The North Carolina Apple Festival fills downtown over Labor Day weekend and draws roughly 200,000 visitors. Main Street curves on purpose. The bends were added in the 1920s to slow horse-and-buggy traffic, then car traffic, and now they slow everything to a stroll. accidental urbanism that turned out to work. Six-block downtown of brick storefronts and outdoor sculpture. The Henderson County Heritage Museum operates from the 1905 courthouse. The Western North Carolina Air Museum runs vintage aircraft including a 1929 Curtiss-Wright Travel Air, which volunteers will start up for you on Sunday afternoons in the warm months. DuPont State Recreational Forest, 15 minutes southwest, holds Hooker Falls, Triple Falls, and High Falls. The Last of the Mohicans and The Hunger Games both shot there. You will recognize the rocks. You will also recognize the moss on the rocks.

Davidson

Twenty miles north of Charlotte. Davidson College, founded 1837, anchors the town. The campus and the downtown share a single tree-lined Main Street with brick walkways and no clear boundary between college and town. you cross from a coffee shop to a classroom without noticing. The Van Every and Smith Galleries on campus run rotating exhibits, free. The Davidson Farmers Market runs Saturday mornings spring into fall in the open lot behind town hall. get there by 8:30 if you want the good tomatoes. Summit Coffee opened on Main in 1998 and remains the default local hangout, the place where you'll spot half the basketball team studying for finals in May. Lake Norman State Park, 20 minutes north, runs swimming, boating, and the 30-mile Itusi Trail loop for mountain bikes. The Davidson Village Inn handles in-town lodging in a frame building on Main. People actually live here. The downtown isn't a stage set, which is exactly its draw.

Banner Elk

3,700 feet between Beech Mountain and Sugar Mountain, the two largest ski resorts in the South. Sugar runs the highest skiable terrain in North Carolina at 5,300 feet. Beech opens its summer mountain-bike park in June and runs lift-served downhill into October. bring elbow pads and don't be a hero. Lees-McRae College anchors the small downtown with year-round student energy that keeps the cafes open on weeknights. Banner Elk Winery on Deer Run Lane was the first commercial winery in the High Country, opened in 2005. The Woolly Worm Festival in October draws around 20,000 people for a caterpillar race that, according to local folklore, predicts the coming winter based on the color bands of the winning worm. The science is suspect. The race is real and the trophy is taken seriously. Grandfather Mountain State Park covers 2,500 acres of high-elevation wilderness with trails to Calloway Peak at 5,946 feet. The kind of summit that earns the climb and refuses to give up the view easily.

Mount Airy

Andy Griffith was born here in 1926. He based fictional Mayberry on the town. The show was filmed in California, but the source material is on Main Street. The Andy Griffith Museum on Rockford Street opened in 2009 and holds props, costumes, and the actor's personal artifacts including the suit he wore in the courtroom episodes. Squad Car Tours run replica Mayberry patrol cars around town with a guide who delivers lines in character. Mayberry Days hits in late September. The Earle Theatre on Main, opened 1938, hosts the WPAQ live old-time and bluegrass radio broadcast every Saturday morning. an unbroken tradition since 1948 and worth getting up early for. Pilot Mountain, the quartzite knob that became the show's Mount Pilot, sits 20 miles south with summit hiking in the state park. Snappy Lunch on Main has served pork chop sandwiches since 1923. Griffith ate them growing up. They are still on the menu. They have not been improved. Order one. Sit on the same kind of stool he sat on. You will understand the show better.

Franklin

Gem country. The Cowee Valley north of town holds rubies, sapphires, and garnets in commercial concentrations, and a half-dozen mines (Cherokee Ruby, Mason Mountain, Sheffield, Old Cardinal Gem) sell buckets to sluice through long flumes. Buy a bucket. Stand in the water. Keep what you find. People have walked out with stones over 100 carats. They are also welcome to overhear you ask the staff to tell you the "best find this week" story, which never stops being a good story. The Macon County Gemboree runs twice a year, spring and fall, with serious dealers. The Scottish Tartans Museum on Main Street holds the only official Scottish tartan registry in the country outside Scotland. yes, really. Nantahala National Forest stretches over 530,000 acres around town, and the Nantahala Gorge supplies the whitewater that put the area on the commercial-rafting map. The Bartram Trail, named for 18th-century botanist William Bartram, runs 110 miles on a route Bartram himself walked in 1775. Yes, that one. The Bartram who named half the southeastern flora.

Highlands

4,118 feet. Second-highest incorporated town in the eastern US. Summer temperatures roughly 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding lowlands. This is why everyone in Atlanta with money has a second house here, and why on a 95-degree weekend in August the Highlands restaurants book up. Old Edwards Inn anchors downtown lodging and dining with a four-diamond AAA rating and a wine cellar serious enough that the staff can actually talk to you about it. The Highlands-Cashiers Chamber Music Festival runs late June into early August in a small barn-like venue where the audience sits close enough to hear the violinists breathing. Dry Falls on the Cullasaja River drops 75 feet over a sandstone shelf with a walkway that goes behind the curtain. You will get wet. That is half the appeal. Whiteside Mountain, six miles east, runs a two-mile loop along the largest sheer cliff face east of the Mississippi. Bridal Veil Falls on US-64 between Highlands and Franklin lets cars drive directly behind the falling water. the only such drive-through waterfall on the East Coast, the kind of thing that should not be skipped on principle.

Washington

The first town in the country named for George Washington. Incorporated 1782, while the man himself was still alive and presumably amused. Locals call it Little Washington to distinguish. It sits on the Pamlico River, 30 miles inland from the Outer Banks, with a 32-block historic district and a working waterfront. The North Carolina Estuarium, opened in 1998, runs over 200 exhibits on the state's estuarine ecosystems. the only museum in the country devoted specifically to estuaries, which sounds niche until you realize how much of the East Coast's seafood comes through this kind of brackish-water mix. The Washington Waterfront Underground Railroad Museum traces the African American history of the Pamlico region in a small storefront that you would walk past if you weren't paying attention. Don't. The Turnage Theater, restored in 2007, hosts concerts and films in a 1916 vaudeville house. Goose Creek State Park 10 miles east runs eight miles of trails along the Pamlico shoreline and a swimming beach that locals know about and tourists usually don't. Little Washington Inn and Elmwood 1820 handle the lodging in restored 19th-century buildings.

Edenton

On the north shore of Albemarle Sound. Founded 1712. Capital of the colony 1722 to 1743. The Cupola House, built 1758, is one of the finest examples of Jacobean wooden architecture in the South. a National Historic Landmark with a steeply gabled roof that looks like it was lifted straight out of an English market town. The 1767 Chowan County Courthouse is the oldest functioning courthouse in North Carolina, still hearing cases. And then there is Penelope Barker. October 1774. She drafted a resolution refusing British tea and got 51 women in Edenton to sign their actual names to it. the first formal political action by women in the American colonies, a year before Lexington and Concord. The British press mocked them in cartoons. The American press mostly ignored them. The signatures held. The Edenton Lighthouse, moved from its original Roanoke Sound site and restored on the waterfront in 2014, is the last surviving screw-pile lighthouse in North Carolina. The Inner Banks Inn handles waterfront lodging. Quiet town. Big history. Not a footnote.

Weekends That Land On Something

Each of the twelve towns rests on something specific. Wake Forest has its left-behind campus. Blowing Rock has the outcrop and the upward wind. Brevard has Pisgah's waterfalls and the white squirrels. Beaufort has Blackbeard's wreck, the wild horses, and the girl in the rum cask. Hendersonville has the apples and the deliberately curved Main Street. Davidson has the college. Banner Elk has the ski mountains and the woolly worm race. Mount Airy has Mayberry and the pork chop sandwich. Franklin has the gem mines and Bartram's trail. Highlands has the elevation and the drive-through waterfall. Washington has the estuary and the first-of-its-name claim. Edenton has Penelope Barker and the colonial capital. Pick the weekend by the anchor, not the mileage.