12 Small Towns In North Carolina Were Ranked Among US Favorites

North Carolina cleans up every time the country hands out small-town honors. Beaufort walked off with the title of America's Coolest Small Town in 2012. No town in the country makes more pottery by hand than Seagrove. Every July, Saluda turns its main street over to Coon Dog Day, a tradition going back to 1963. Travel writers have crowned Edenton the prettiest small town in the South more than once. The honors pile up for all kinds of reasons here, including pirate harbors, mountain waterfalls, and the dunes where powered flight got off the ground.

Beaufort

Budget Travel readers handed Beaufort the title of America's Coolest Small Town in 2012. Its waterfront historic district is home to the oldest wood-framed courthouse in North Carolina, along with the Old Burying Ground, where one weathered grave marks a girl buried in a keg of rum. Blackbeard based himself in these waters three centuries ago. Divers found the wreck of his flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, just offshore in 1996. The recovered cannons and gold went on display at the North Carolina Maritime Museum downtown.

Across the channel, the Rachel Carson Reserve protects a maze of salt marsh and tidal flats. Wild Banker horses graze the islands there, descendants of stock that swam ashore generations ago. Kayakers paddle the shallows for a closer look. Boaters cross the inlet to Shackleford Banks and the Cape Lookout lighthouse, where the beaches remain wild and undeveloped.

Bath

Bath is the oldest town in North Carolina. The colonial assembly chartered it in 1705, which made it the state's first town and its first port of entry. The explorer John Lawson laid out its original lots along the Pamlico River that same year. Blackbeard knew this harbor too and settled here around 1718 after collecting a royal pardon. The Historic Bath State Historic Site preserves several of the original buildings. St. Thomas Episcopal Church, finished in 1734, remains the oldest church in the state. Nearby stand the colonial-era Palmer-Marsh and Bonner houses.

The original 1705 street grid forms a National Register historic district. The church bells still carry across Bath Creek at noon, much as they did when ships crowded the waterfront. Fewer than 300 people live here, which has spared the old port from modern sprawl. The result is one of the few places in the country where colonial America survives more or less intact.

Seagrove

Seagrove carries the title of Handmade Pottery Capital of the United States. More working potters cluster here than anywhere else in the country, carrying on a craft that goes back more than two centuries. The red clay underfoot is the reason, prized by generations of potters for its strength in the kiln. The North Carolina Pottery Center maps the whole story, with exhibits tracing the tradition back to its earliest Native and Moravian roots.

Pottery shops line the highways for miles around town, many of them family kilns where the wheels turn in plain view. Some potters still fire the old way, in wood-burning groundhog kilns. Face jugs, salt-glazed crocks, and delicate tableware all come off these wheels. With fewer than 300 residents, Seagrove proves a town does not need size to earn a global reputation.

Bryson City

Bryson City opens straight onto the most-visited national park in the country. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park sees more than twelve million visits a year, more than any other national park. Half a million acres of ridgeline and old-growth forest start at the edge of downtown. The park alone offers more than 800 miles of trail, including a stretch of the Appalachian Trail.

The Great Smoky Mountains Railroad sends excursion trains out of the historic depot, through river gorges and tunnels that car traffic never sees. Deep Creek, on the park boundary, threads past three waterfalls within an easy walk. In summer, locals float down the creek on inner tubes.

Hillsborough

The Wall Street Journal once dubbed Hillsborough "America's Little Literary Town," a name Garden and Gun echoed when it called the place the best literary small town in the country. Per capita, few places anywhere count as many published authors. Novelists like Lee Smith and Allan Gurganus have called it home for decades. Hillsborough is one of the oldest colonial towns in North Carolina, founded in 1754 and later a flashpoint of the Regulator movement. Its historic district counts more than a hundred buildings on the National Register, set among Federal, Greek Revival, and Italianate facades. The Old Orange County Courthouse presides over Churton Street.

Just outside town, Occoneechee Mountain rises to the highest point in Orange County, with short trails to overlooks above the Eno River. Anglers and paddlers work the Eno itself at the state park downstream. Ayr Mount, an 1815 estate, opens its grounds for walks along the river bluff.

Highlands

Highlands earns its name at 4,118 feet, one of the highest incorporated towns east of the Mississippi River. The thin mountain air made it a cool summer retreat more than a century ago. The main street now mixes old inns with galleries and restaurants. The Appalachian Mountains wrap the town on every side. The Highlands Biological Station tends a botanical garden of more than 450 native species at the edge of downtown.

Waterfalls ring the town, several of them right beside the road. Bridal Veil Falls drops in a sheet thin enough that cars once drove behind it on the old highway. A few miles on, Dry Falls lets walkers pass behind the curtain of water without getting soaked. Trails into the surrounding Nantahala National Forest reach quieter cascades deeper in the backcountry.

Saluda

Saluda formed around a railroad that closed decades ago. For more than a century, freight trains ground up the steepest standard-gauge mainline grade in the United States to reach the town, climbing nearly 4.7 feet for every hundred. The line saw so many runaway wrecks that crews built escape spurs into the mountainside. The 1903 depot now houses the town's railroad museum. The old corridor itself is being remade into a walking and biking trail.

Every July Saluda hosts Coon Dog Day, a street festival for hunting hounds that dates to 1963. The short main street carries a handful of antique shops and a coffee roaster the rest of the year. Pearson's Falls, a few minutes away, spills through a glen so rich in wildflowers that a garden club has protected it for nearly a century.

Southport

Southport hosts the official North Carolina 4th of July Festival, a weeklong celebration with roots reaching back to 1795. The parade alone brings more than a hundred units down Moore and Howe streets. Fireworks close out the week over the Cape Fear River. Hollywood noticed the oak-lined waterfront long ago, using it for films like the 2013 movie "Safe Haven." Fort Johnston, the North Carolina Maritime Museum at Southport, and the old Brunswick County jail tell more of the town's history.

Shrimp boats still tie up along the waterfront at the mouth of the Cape Fear. Painters and photographers come for the soft southern light off the water. A ferry crosses to Bald Head Island and Old Baldy, the oldest standing lighthouse in the state. Oak Island and its long public beaches lie just across the bridge.

Kitty Hawk

Kitty Hawk gave the world powered flight. The Wright brothers chose this barrier island for its steady gusts and soft landing sand, camping here and testing gliders for three seasons starting in 1900. The first powered flight lifted off in December 1903, just south at Kill Devil Hills, where the national memorial stands today. The Monument to a Century of Flight, in Kitty Hawk itself, marks the spot the brothers first made their base on the Outer Banks.

Aviation buffs still make the pilgrimage every December for the anniversary of the first takeoff. The beaches are part of the Outer Banks, among the most popular shorelines on the East Coast. Behind the dunes, the Kitty Hawk Woods Reserve preserves a rare maritime forest of old live oaks.

Edenton

Travel writers have long called Edenton the prettiest small town in the South. It served as North Carolina's first colonial capital. Brick streets and three centuries of preserved architecture line the bluff above Edenton Bay. The 1767 Chowan County Courthouse, the most intact colonial courthouse in America, still hears cases today as a National Historic Landmark. A block away, the 1758 Cupola House shows off some of the finest Georgian woodwork in the country.

Edenton also made history in 1774, when Penelope Barker and about fifty local women signed a public protest against British tea. The act is remembered as one of the first organized political stands by women in the colonies, marked now by a bronze teapot on a Revolutionary War cannon on the courthouse green. Down on the water, the 1886 Roanoke River Lighthouse is the last screw-pile lighthouse left in North Carolina. The same waterfront marks a stop on the Underground Railroad's water routes, the path the writer Harriet Jacobs took toward freedom.

Brevard

Brevard goes by the Land of Waterfalls, with more than 250 of them spilling across Transylvania County. White squirrels are the other local celebrity, scampering through downtown in numbers found almost nowhere else. The town puts on the White Squirrel Festival in their honor each spring. Every summer the Brevard Music Center brings orchestras and young musicians to its open-air auditorium for a full season of concerts.

DuPont State Recreational Forest protects more than ten thousand acres and several big cascades, including the High Falls and Triple Falls seen in "The Hunger Games." Looking Glass Falls, in the neighboring Pisgah National Forest, drops sixty feet right beside the road. Students and musicians from Brevard College frequent the cafes and breweries downtown.

Blowing Rock

Blowing Rock is home to North Carolina's oldest travel attraction. The cliff that shares the town's name has welcomed onlookers since 1933, perched 4,000 feet up above the Johns River Gorge. The gorge funnels wind upward so sharply that light objects tossed over the edge can blow right back. Snow there sometimes appears to fall upside down. The ledge looks out on Grandfather Mountain and Table Rock.

Galleries, candy shops, and old-line restaurants line Main Street, busy through the summer and fall. Moses H. Cone Memorial Park spreads carriage roads and a turn-of-the-century manor across the ridge just north of downtown. Bass Lake, at the bottom of the estate, has a level loop trail under the rhododendron.

Carolina's Quiet Headliners

National attention rarely lands on a town by accident. Bath has guarded the state's oldest streets since 1705, back when Blackbeard called the harbor home. Bryson City opens onto the most-visited national park in America. Kitty Hawk gave the world its first powered flight. Southport still hosts the state's official Independence Day celebration. Each of these towns built its name on something genuine, a claim that stands up long after the magazine lists move on. Every one of them already belongs to the people who live here.