North Carolina – Ancient Mountains and Enchanting Islands

“I feel so comfortable here in North Carolina,” said Rita, my walking tour guide and a transplant from New Mexico, as we sat sipping rhubarb-and-mint moonshine tea on the front porch of Blowing Rock’s New Public House & Hotel.

I, TOO, WAS IN MY COMFORT ZONE. Dinner had been nuevo Southern cuisine at its best – delicious Wild Boar Meatloaf and green-chilli mashed potatoes prepared by the inn’s chef, Michael Foreman, a transplant from Denver’s esteemed Brown Palace Hotel; the nostalgic strains of a bluegrass band were wafting from the Music on the Lawn concert at the inn next door, and – to the west – the sun was spectacularly setting over tier upon tier of the Appalachians, some of the oldest mountains on earth.

Earlier in the day, Rita and I had strolled along the picturesque main street, ice-cream cones in hand, popping into the small local house museum where Rita was based, historic churches and tempting craft shops … these western North Carolina mountains are full of potters, weavers, basket makers and other artisans as well as musicians who still play the zithers, lutes, mandolins and other traditional instruments first brought into the region by their European forefathers.

Many of the small town’s grand houses and historic resort hotels, said Rita, were built in the 19th century  when it was the fashion for the wealthy textile and furniture barons from the lowlands to seek solace there from the summer heat.

So why such a pedestrian name for the town as Blowing Rock? Because, said Rita, the unusual air currents raging under a nearby pinnacle blow back any light object dropped from its edge. Even the snow falls upside down. And, of course, there is an associated Native American legend. It seems that an Indian brave, conflicted in his loyalties between his tribe and his squaw, threw himself from the crag only to be wafted back into the arms of his tearful beloved above.

THE NORTH CAROLINA MOUNTAINS ARE FULL OF DRAMATIC TALES

But then, these mountains are full of dramatic tales of Native Americans, frontiersmen, writers, artists and musicians, not to forget the odd millionaires who just wanted to get away from it all. Many of their sites are linked by the spectacular, 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway,  which soars up to 6,047 feet across the mountain tops of some of eastern America’s tallest mountains. At its southern tip is the land of the eastern band of the Cherokee nation. Somehow escaping the infamous 19th-century ‘Trail of Tears’, which rounded up and marched many of their fellow tribal members off to Oklahoma, they maintain their reconstructed ancestral village and a museum. On summer evenings you can sit in a forest-surrounded amphitheatre watching Unto These Hills, a dramatisation of their story, even as the exploits of explorer Daniel Boone are portrayed in Horn in the West at the university town of Boone to the north.

Flat Rock is known as the home of poet Carl Sandburg and the well-regarded Flat Rock Playhouse; towering Chimney Rock featured in the film The Last of the Mohicans starring Daniel Day Lewis; nearby Lake Lure was the setting for Dirty Dancing, and the exciting railway scenes in The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, took place on the Smoky Mountains Railroad near Dillsboro and Bryson City.  Among the wealthy tycoons escaping to these mountains was industrialist Moses Cone, whose impressive white mansion south of Blowing Rock now houses a showcase and sales room for a rich variety of southern arts and crafts. Cascading down a hillside toward a distant lake, the surrounding park lands are popular with hikers and horseback riders.

Among the earliest European settlers in the region were the Scots and Scots-Irish, whose heritage is flamboyantly celebrated each July at the Highland Games, held at the next stop on the parkway, Grandfather Mountain, its 5,946ft summit reached by a mile-high swinging bridge. Later on the route I passed the turn-off to the state park surrounding Mount Mitchell, at 6,684 feet the highest point east of the Mississippi River. But first, I dived down into a little valley where I was told there might be mountain music in the Orchards at Altapass store and visitors centre. And, indeed, there was – a duet of women fiddlers playing good old Irish-inspired ballads, while one musician’s young son clog-danced in the foreground  and an elderly couple fox-trotted around the floor. There were treats to buy in the open-plan building’s shop – liquorice sticks, blueberry muffins and a remedy for ‘snakebite, arthritis and about anything that hurts you’. Feeling peckish, I headed for the food van next door to indulge in peach tea, a pulled-pork sandwich, pinto beans, corn bread and apple pie.

All along the way there were turn-offs to parks, historic sites, waterfalls, resort areas, summer camps, lakes and such evocatively-named communities as Little Switzerland and Maggie Valley, but after a brief informative stop at the Blue Ridge Parkway Visitor Center and the nearby Folk Art Center – filled with dazzling arts and crafts from throughout the Appalachian region – I headed straight for Asheville. With 83,000 residents, it’s the largest and best-known of the mountain communities.

ASHEVILLE – THE BILTMORE ESTATE – AMERICA’S LARGEST PRIVATE HOME

There’s no doubt about it, this town is fun and funky, crammed with artists, street musicians, restaurants and more brew pubs per capital than any place else in the state. (I even witnessed a bicycle-powered mobile pub, pedalled down the main street by a riotous, beer-swilling hen party while the regally-pregnant bride-to-be held court from her seat of honour.)

The city also has long been popular with writers. Scott Fitzgerald worked on some of his novels in the impressive, reputedly-haunted mountaintop Grove Park Inn, now an Omni resort, while his wife, Zelda, resided in a nearby sanatorium where she, alas, perished in a fire. And the life and literary career of Thomas Wolfe (best known for Look Homeward, Angel) has inspired a film-in-making starring Colin Firth, Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. Meanwhile, you can visit the boarding house, now a museum, where Tom grew up.

However, without doubt, the main attraction of Asheville is the Biltmore Estate, which features a chateauesque, 250-room mansion – the largest private home in America – surrounded by beautiful parklands designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, best known as the creator of Manhattan’s Central Park.

Although I have visited many of the UK’s stately homes, a guided Upstairs/ Downstairs tour of this palatial pile was still awe inspiring. It was also a tribute to its individualistic founder, George W Vanderbilt, scion of one of America’s wealthiest families, who, in 1895, put his roots down there rather than, like his peers, building an opulent Gilded Age ‘cottage’ in fashionable Newport, Rhode Island.

Not only is Biltmore filled with opulent staterooms and bedrooms, recreational facilities ranging from a bowling alley to a swimming pool, and unusually-comfortable living and working accommodation for the sizeable staff, but it also contains an impressive library housing half of Vanderbilt’s 23,000 books, a huge pipe organ, and numerous artworks, including a stunning portrait by Boldini of George’s wife, Edith. Vanderbilt also established America’s first forestry school, and the grounds also include lovely gardens, a winery, restaurants, craft shops and a hilltop hotel.

Another plus is that the estate remains in the ownership of the family, now intermarried with the Cecils, who trace their heritage back to William Cecil, the famous advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. Among its forthcoming special attractions will be an exhibition of costumes from Downton Abbey scheduled for February-May, 2015.

Asheville is also known for its wide range of bed & breakfasts, some located in historic homes. I stayed on the edge of town in hilltop Reynolds House, a majestic 1847 mansion once owned by State Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, whose heiress wife owned the world-renowned Hope Diamond (now in Washington, DC’s Smithsonian Museum). Over a gourmet breakfast, co-host Billy Sanders regaled us with colourful tales of the Reynolds family and of Asheville in general, while his partner, Michael Griffith, whose Chicago-based business produces models of historic buildings, showed us his model of Highclere Castle, the setting for Downton Abbey.

WINSTON-SALEM – AN 18TH-CENTURY VILLAGE

For something completely different, I headed 142 miles east to Winston-Salem. Promoting itself as ‘The City of Arts & Innovation’, this hybrid of industry-founded/arts rich Winston and the 1776 Moravian settlement of Salem is best known to tourists for picturesque Old Salem. There, tree-shaded brick sidewalks lead to a park-like town square, historic homes and shops, and lovely old churches established by Protestant immigrants from what is now the Czech Republic. Appropriately-garbed interpreters are on hand to guide you through some of the buildings; there are delicious meals to be had at The Tavern in Old Salem (my chicken pot pie was a real winner), and, for a special treat, you can drop by the Winkler Bakery, which has been producing scrumptious sugar cakes and cookies for the past 200 years. Also worth a visit are the film theatre, exhibition area and shop in the spacious, modern Visitor Center, and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, with its intriguing room settings of furniture and arts and crafts.

The city has a lively Downtown Arts District, a unique high school/university combo totally dedicated to the arts and, set in spacious, beautifully-manicured grounds on the edge of town, two elegant mansions dedicated to art, architecture and hospitality. Built in 1917 by tobacco baron RJ Reynolds and his wife, Katharine, 64-room Reynolda House is now the Reynolda House Museum of American Art, which displays the family’s tasteful furnishings alongside masterpieces by Charles Wilson Peale, Frederic Church and Georgia O’Keeffe. Nearby Graylyn, completed in 1932 for Reynolds Tobacco president Bowman Grey and his wife, Natalie, entices you inside with a comprehensive Butler’s Tour that includes everything from a breakfast room housed in part of a former mosque imported from Istanbul to a library with panelling imported from Paris. Now an international conference centre, it has provided lodging for the likes of US presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, writer and activist Maya Angelou, and TV and publishing celebrity Oprah Winfrey.

CHARLOTTE – A MODERN BANKING CENTRE

Checking out of my overnight accommodation in the Historic Brookstown Inn, tastefully and atmospherically converted from a former cotton factory, I headed 81 miles to the south-west to

Charlotte, the state’s largest city with around 775,000 residents and America’s second-largest banking centre after New York City. Among its cluster of Uptown skyscrapers are the corporate headquarters of the Bank of America, the East Coast headquarters of Wells Fargo and the former headquarters of the Reynolds Tobacco empire, reputedly the prototype for Manhattan’s Empire State Building.

My hotel, the elegant Dunhill, built in 1929 and a former host to the likes of Paul McCartney and Aretha Franklin, faces handsome, tree-lined Tryon Street, a former Indian trail that intersects at Trade Street to form the city’s main, statue-adorned square. Around the corner, in front of the Holiday Inn, is a statue of Queen Charlotte, after whom the city was named. Ironically, Charlotte and its surrounding Mecklenburg County were among the first to rebel against her husband, King George III, refusing to pay the tea tax long before the famous Boston Tea Party protests, and preceding the Declaration of Independence with its earlier Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, sent to the fledgling US government via fast-riding Captain James Jack, whose feat inspired a local equestrian statue.

Once primarily the hub of an agricultural area and then a textile manufacturing centre, Charlotte has moved from field to factory to finance within 150 years. Among its numerous museums, the Levine Museum of the New South presents the time line of the Civil Rights movement and, when I visited, a moving exhibition on the plight of North Carolina’s illegal teenage immigrants.

The local Mecca for NASCAR-racing enthusiasts is the multi-storey NASCAR Hall of Fame, which not only heralds the history and heroes of the white-knuckle sport but allows you to jump in a racing car and engage in a hair-raising simulated race (I abstained). Like many of the city’s key attractions, it is easily reached by the inexpensive, 15-stop Light Rail system that terminates in the atmospheric 7th Street Market. There, you can sample regional food and wine and meet some of the drop-outs from the corporate world who now produce such things as boutique chocolates, healthy kale and spinach smoothies, and freshly-baked bread. The NoDa Brewery, which I visited later in another, cutting-edge part of town, is part of the local trend for producing small-batch premium beers. North Carolina also has a wine-production area in Yadkin County near Winston-Salem.

For those who collect urban trivia, parts of Homeland and The Hunger Games were filmed in Charlotte, and the area also was the site of the first major gold rush – in 1799, after a doorstop at a local farm was discovered to be a 17lb solid-gold nugget.

PINEHURST – THE HOME OF AMERICAN GOLF

A less-than-two-hour drive eastward led to south-central North Carolina, with its sandy soil, pine forests, mild climate and more-than-40 championship golf courses. They are all within a 15-mile radius of three small towns – Pinehurst, Southern Pines and Aberdeen, collectively known as the ‘Home of American Golf’. I had just missed the historic, back-to-back US Open Men’s and Women’s Championships, so there was room for me in the Pinehurst Resort’s century-old Carolina Hotel, graced by a wrap-around porch and elegant reception area.

A leisurely stroll along sidewalks shaded by huge, Spanish moss-festooned oak trees and I was soon in the town’s central, stage-set village, designed by the ubiquitous Frederick Law Olmstead. It was resplendent with hanging, flower-laden baskets, quaint shops and handsome, white-frame houses surrounded by picket fences. There was great food to be had at the atmospheric 1895 Grille in the Pinehurst Resort’s vintage Holly Inn; Tufts Archive in the town park tells the story of the town founder; and, with its shop-lined main street bisected by the Amtrak train line linking New York City and Miami, nearby Southern Pines is also worth a visit.

NORTH CAROLINA COASTAL DELIGHTS

Now about two hours’ drive from the Atlantic Coast, I decided to drop by the community of Seagrove, where dozens of craftsmen have been turning out handsome wares ever since European potters settled the area in the 1700s. Their creations were ‘oh so tempting’ until I recalled my overweight baggage challenge. So, I headed on to the port city of Wilmington, set beside the ominously-named but tranquil Cape Fear River and promoting itself as ‘cool, quirky and off-the-beaten path’.

The city’s picturesque waterfront is lined with pleasure boats, its streets with restaurants and art galleries – we joined the locals over wine and canapés on a fourth-Friday Gallery Walk. It’s also become known as ‘Hollywood East’, as about 400 large-screen and TV films have been made there since 1983, when Dino de Laurentiis established what has now become EUE/Screen Gems Studios. The largest studio complex east of California, it has recently resumed tours of its sound stages and 50-acre lot. Local walking and motor tours also point out some of the sites featured in Blue Velvet, Dawson’s Creek, Under the Dome, Sleepy Hollow and other popular films and TV series. Some of the most-evocative sites are found among the gardens and waterways of lush-and-lovely, 67-acre Airlie Gardens on the edge of town.

To learn more about the area, I took, first, a 30-minute horse-drawn carriage tour past some of the town’s beautiful white-frame homes and then a one-hour cruise on The Wilmington catamaran up the Cape Fear River. Founded in 1732, Wilmington was a major cotton-exporting port as well as an importing and railway hub for the Southern troops during the 19th-century American Civil War. Daring Confederate blockade runners also used it as a base, and nearby island-sited Fort Fisher was the last Confederate stronghold to fall during the war.

Along the 130 miles of the river which can be navigated are numerous varieties of birds, including bald eagles, herons and egrets, alligators, and areas rich in marine life, including catfish, flounder, striped bass and blue crabs. Across the river from Wilmington, on Eagles Island, rests the majestic World War II Battleship North Carolina, which can be toured.

Wilmington is also the gateway to three major beach resorts – Carolina and Kure, both on Pleasure Island, and Wrightsville, where I hopped on a motorboat excursion to uninhabited Masonboro Island, known for its shells, bird and plant life and wide, under-populated Atlantic Ocean strand.

Wrightsville Beach itself was just the opposite, lively with beach umbrellas, a lifeguard station and sun-searching throngs at the base of the renowned Oceanic Restaurant, where I enjoyed a platter of succulent local seafood followed by peach cobbler.

Checking out of the attractive Wilmingtonian B&B, well-sited only two blocks from the river, I headed up the coast to my final destination, the enchanting waterfront town of Beaufort. Alas, because of a tremendous thunderstorm, I missed joining the annual Old Homes & Gardens Tour, but there was some compensation in a delicious, waterfront seafood dinner at the Front Street Grill and a private tour the following morning of the key buildings in the Beaufort Historic Site. Among the treats were two quite-different historic homes, a fully-equipped vintage apothecary, a courthouse/jail and an art gallery full of tempting paintings and jewellery.

As I sat on my Beaufort Inn balcony at twilight overlooking boats resting at anchor, I lamented that I had run out of time. There was still much to see along the barrier islands known as ‘the Outer Banks’, which parallel the mainland up to the Virginia border. Among the sights are wild horses descended, it is said, from those that escaped from wrecked Spanish galleons; photogenic lighthouses; towering dunes, including the one at Kill Devil Hills from which the Wright Brothers launched the first powered flight in December 1903; and – at Manteo on Roanoke Island – the Elizabethan Gardens and the staging of The Lost Colony outdoor summer drama, both commemorating Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1587 English colony, which mysteriously disappeared within three years.

Nor, as I rushed for my return flight to the UK, would there be time to visit the reconstruction of New Bern’s Tryon Palace, built in 1770 for the royal governor of North Carolina; the grand State Capitol in Raleigh; or the lovely campuses of Durham’s renowned Duke University and of Chapel Hill’s University of North Carolina, established in 1789 as America’s first public university and my alma mater.

But one thing was certain, the reference North Carolinians sometimes make to their state as a ‘valley of humility between two mountains of conceit’ (South Carolina and Virginia) should be swept away. For, rather than extolling humility, they should take pride in the bounty of their state … its beautiful coastal and mountain scenery, great universities and majestic, stately homes, historic small towns and progressive New South cities, wonderful arts and crafts, and inspiration for so many books, films and musical compositions.