Welcome to the
Best of the Blue Ridge Awards
Every five years, we invite our readers to tell us their favorites – hikes, romantic getaways, state parks, musicians. This year, you responded by mail and through our website, and we discovered some new places ourselves through your votes. On the following pages are the winners, plus some interesting stories we found along the way.
Winners by Category
- Best of the Outdoors
- Best State Park
- Best Places to Go
- Best Food & Drink
- Outstanding Mountain People
- Top Mountain Happenings
- Best Miscellaneous
- Best Things Not on the List
- Best Mountain Moment in 2007
Featured Story
An Orchard with Railroad Roots
The Orchard at Altapass celebrates its centennial in 2008, with an Aug. 2 “Memories for Keeping” evening of music and recording of family histories and an Aug. 15 Centennial Ball. Those events are in addition to the live music, dancing, storytelling, hayrides, historic reenactments and other activities that cram the calendar of the popular Blue Ridge Parkway stop-off (MP 328.3) from its mid-May opening to its Oct. 31 end-of-apple-season close.
Evidence from Clinchfield Railroad archives, stored at East Tennessee State University’s Sherrod Library in Johnson City, Tenn., suggest 1908 as the year the orchard offered its first apples for sale. That’s according to Judy Carson, who, with her husband Bill and sister-in-law Kit Trubey, has been running the orchard since Trubey purchased the 288-acre property in 1994 to preserve the land from development.
When Judy and local musician Terry McKinney researched the history of Altapass for a book in the “Images of America” series, they combed the archives and discovered that in 1910 the orchard, one of two that the railroad planted on the crest of the Blue Ridge to increase its freight business, contained 11,046 trees with an average age of eight years.
“Since it takes at least six years for trees to produce salable apples,” says Judy, “we figured the orchard started selling apples in 1908.”
The orchard was first known as McKinney Gap Orchard, then as Holston Orchard (Holston was the name of the railroad’s land-holding company), then simply as Altapass Orchard. We “jazzed the name up a bit, to Orchard at Altapass,” she says.
“The history of this whole area is intimately related to the railroad,” Bill Carson says. It was the railroad that coined the name Altapass (“high pass”) for the high point on its 309-mile route from Elkhorn City, Ky. to Spartanburg, S.C., which occurs at the orchard. To drum up tourist trade, it built a station and a fancy hotel to accommodate 150 guests. The hotel, station and the other orchard are long gone, but the Orchard at Altapass is thriving. Among the 40 varieties of apples it produces (about two dozen in salable quantities), it still offers for sale York Imperials, Stayman Winesaps, and Virginia Beauties (a perennial local favorite) from some of the railroad’s original trees. Information: altapassorchard.com.
—Elizabeth Hunter
