6 Most Eccentric Towns In The Southern United States

The American South holds some genuinely eccentric small towns. Each of the six ahead runs on a tradition with no equivalent anywhere else in the country. One Georgia town remade itself as a Bavarian alpine village in 1969. One Florida community has run as a spiritualist camp since 1894. One Tennessee distillery still operates in a dry county. The six earn their reputations by being exactly themselves.

Helen, Georgia

Helen sits in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northeast Georgia with the architectural appearance of a Bavarian alpine village. The remake happened in 1969 when three local businessmen hired the artist John Kollock to redraw the failing logging-and-tourism town as an alpine resort. The city building code now requires every commercial structure to follow Bavarian alpine design rules: hand-painted murals, exposed wooden beams, decorative shutters, and steep gabled roofs. The result is the third-most-visited tourist destination in Georgia, after Atlanta and Savannah.

The Chattahoochee River runs straight through town, and visitors can tube down it from Cool River Tubing or Helen Tubing for a few dollars in summer. Oktoberfest at the Helen Festhalle runs about 50 days each fall (September through early November), one of the longer-running Oktoberfest celebrations in the country. Anna Ruby Falls in the Chattahoochee National Forest five miles north of town is a 150-foot twin waterfall reached by a half-mile paved trail from the visitor center.

Cassadaga, Florida

Cassadaga sits in Volusia County in central Florida, about halfway between Orlando and Daytona Beach. The Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association was chartered on December 18, 1894 by George P. Colby, a New York spiritualist medium who said his spirit guide Seneca had directed him south to found a winter community for spiritualists. The camp covers 57 acres and has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a U.S. Historic District since March 1991.

About 100 full-time residents live in the camp, with roughly 25 certified mediums and healers serving private readings from their homes along Stevens Street. The certification process takes four to six years and requires sponsorship by the camp association. The Colby Memorial Temple is the center of the camp and the venue for Sunday services. The Cassadaga Hotel on Cassadaga Road, built in 1922 and rebuilt after a 1926 fire, anchors the village commercial side and now operates outside the camp's direct control, offering palmistry, tarot, and other readings alongside its hotel and restaurant operations.

Eureka Springs, Arkansas

Eureka Springs sits in the Ozark Mountains of northwest Arkansas on terrain so steep that the downtown historic district has no traffic lights at any of its intersections. The entire downtown is built into the side of a mountain with winding streets that cross at strange angles and stone stairways that climb between blocks. The whole 230-block historic downtown sits on the National Register of Historic Places as one of the larger collections of preserved Victorian-era buildings in the country, with most structures dating between 1880 and 1900.

The 1886 Crescent Hotel and Spa, four stories of cut limestone perched on the mountain above town, has been billed as "America's Most Haunted Hotel" since the operators built ghost tours into the marketing in the 1990s. The hotel briefly served as Norman Baker's cancer hospital in the 1930s, a quack operation that fed Baker's later prison sentence for mail fraud. Christ of the Ozarks, a 67-foot white concrete statue of Jesus that overlooks the town from Magnetic Mountain, was completed in 1966 and anchors the Great Passion Play amphitheater that runs evening performances through the summer.

Micanopy, Florida

Micanopy sits in north-central Florida about 10 miles south of Gainesville with a downtown so deliberately left alone that locals call it the Town That Time Forgot. Cholokka Boulevard, the main commercial street, holds 27 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places dating to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The town has appeared in several films, most famously the 1991 Michael J. Fox vehicle Doc Hollywood, which used Micanopy as the fictional town of Grady, South Carolina.

The Micanopy Historical Society Museum in the 1890 Thrasher Warehouse on Cholokka Boulevard holds about 3,000 artifacts, including Native American archaeological finds and pioneer-era agricultural equipment. The Herlong Mansion bed-and-breakfast in the 1845 Greek Revival house on Cholokka is the signature lodging in town and the venue for the Micanopy Fall Harvest Festival on the third weekend of October. Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park five miles north covers 23,000 acres of restored wet prairie with a herd of about 50 free-roaming bison and Florida cracker horses, the only such combination on a Florida state park.

Breaux Bridge, Louisiana

Breaux Bridge sits in St. Martin Parish in the Acadiana region of Louisiana, about 11 miles east of Lafayette. The Louisiana state legislature officially designated the town the "Crawfish Capital of the World" in 1959. The Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival on the first full weekend in May draws roughly 100,000 visitors over three days and includes the world's largest crawfish étouffée cook-off, the official state crawfish-eating championship, and elaborate Mardi Gras-style parades with crawfish-themed floats.

The town runs on Cajun music year-round, not just during festival week. Café Des Amis on East Bridge Street hosts the Zydeco Breakfast every Saturday morning, a tradition running since the 1990s with live accordion-and-rubboard bands and dancers on the dining room floor by 8 a.m. The downtown historic district holds several buildings on the National Register, the oldest being the 1811 Silvestre Broussard House, which served as a boarding house during the French Acadian settlement of the region.

Lynchburg, Tennessee

Lynchburg is a one-traffic-light city in south-central Tennessee with a population of about 6,400 and a Moore County government that has been consolidated with the city since 1988. Jack Daniel's Distillery, registered by Jasper Newton "Jack" Daniel in 1866, is the oldest registered distillery in the United States and the only major American whiskey distillery operating in a dry county. Moore County has been dry since Tennessee passed its statewide prohibition law in 1909, 11 years before the federal Volstead Act.

The distillery runs tours that conclude with a guided whiskey tasting, an exception to the dry-county rule that the Tennessee legislature granted in 1995. The White Rabbit Bottle Shop on the distillery grounds is the only place in Moore County where alcohol can legally be sold, and it sells commemorative bottles under another narrow state-law exception for distilleries. Miss Mary Bobo's Boarding House on Main Street has served family-style Southern lunches since the early 20th century in a Greek Revival building that pre-dates the Civil War. The Lynchburg public square holds the 1885 Moore County Courthouse and a tight grid of small shops.

What Makes a Town Eccentric

The thread connecting these six is that each runs on a tradition the rest of the country does not replicate. Helen built a Bavarian village in north Georgia and held it for more than 50 years. Cassadaga has run a spiritualist camp since 1894. Eureka Springs built its downtown on the side of a mountain and never paved over it. Micanopy left its 1880s commercial district intact while the rest of Florida built theme parks and condos. Breaux Bridge made crawfish a civic identity. Lynchburg runs the country's oldest registered distillery in a county that does not allow whiskey to be sold. Each is worth a visit on its own terms.