A Valentine’s Day Visit to a North Carolina Town.
Joan Vannorsdall
Overlooking the town of Murphy, The Hunter Pyramid memorializes the area’s first white settler.
The most direct route to Murphy from the northeast takes you through the Nantahala Gorge. Rushing not advised: Just take your time and notice the nearly vertical drop from the high rocks and wooded ridges, springs running down to the winding river that, midway through a rainy February, careens through the gorge. It’s wild beauty, and it’s free.
Well before you get to Murphy—Cherokee County seat and a distant 355 miles from the state capital, Raleigh—the road straightens and flattens, and eventually you find yourself in a downtown that’s full of cars, shops and historic brick buildings. There’s a baby boutique, the Murphy Art Center, a bookstore. Gift and antique shops. A restored, two-screen theatre (the Henn, appropriately emblazoned with a chicken) showing first-run movies every afternoon and evening. Around the corner on Peachtree Street, the massive Classical Revival, blue marble courthouse dominates the sky.
And all over Murphy, there are restaurants. Restaurants that are filling up fast, for some of which (as I discover the hard way), you’d better have made reservations.
A remote mountain town of 1,700 people, 355 miles from the state capital, finding its way forward. The question I’m here to answer is…How?
The answers come fast and furious from Mayor Rick Ramsey, who graduated from Murphy High School in 1974, went away to college, and for 35 years worked for Lockheed Martin, living all over the country and abroad. When he retired, he and his wife returned to the area to be near their grandchildren.
Joan Vannorsdall
Historian Billy Ray Palmer knows the deep story of the mysterious Moon-Eyed People sculpture, unearthed in 1841.
“My elementary school principal was the mayor here for a while—he convinced me to run. I knew I wanted to give back.”
It appears that he has, with good help from many local boosters. Murphy is now a Main Street Downtown Associate Community, which opens the doors to grants and enables the town to benefit from a year of consulting assistance.
“We had people spilling out the door of the old L&N Depot to meet with the Main Street folks a couple weeks ago. ‘We don’t usually see this kind of action,’ they told me.”
Murphy’s fast success with Main Street will also give the town connections with other communities…something which Ramsey clearly prioritizes. His weekly radio show with the mayor of Andrews provides listeners with the latest information from both towns.
“Our two towns, well, there’s a deep and longstanding rivalry. We’re working to soften it some,” Ramsey says. (Clearly, they do: listening to them go back and forth is better than Comedy Central.)
Ramsey is also working to give young Murphy residents a say in the way forward. His recent Young Adult Roundtable resulted in a presentation to Town Council and the Downtown Business Association. And one student participating in Tri-County Community College’s Early College program is working on redesigning the downtown parking area.
The community college tailors its curriculum to up-and-coming prospective employers (including gaming, to provide trained employees for the nearby Harrah Casino.) And although the textile mills of yore are gone, Murphy is home to one of the largest data centers east of the Mississippi, and several manufacturing companies employing hundreds.
We see the Harshaw Chapel, where Abraham Lincoln’s alleged biological father is buried. We stop in the Appalachian Driving Experience, where you can rent a Porsche and drive the mountain roads. We drive up to the 18-foot Hunter Pyramid—said to be the largest in the eastern United States—built to memorialize the first white settler in the area by his granddaughter. We see the four-mile Murphy River Walk and Canoe Trail, with its interpretive signs including the Cherokee legend of the Great Leech, which waited in deep water for passersby and swept them into the river.
And in the Cherokee County Historical Museum (housed in a Carnegie library and a designated Trail of Tears interpretive center), retired history professor Billy Ray Palmer shows us the carved soapstone effigy of the Moon-Eyed people, unearthed in 1841 and thought to represent a lost race of pre-Cherokee settlers in the area.
Joan Vannorsdall
Mayor Rick Ramsey stands with a Porsche 911 GT3 RS in the display room of Appalachian Driving Experience.
When we part, Mayor Ramsey hands me a train whistle, part of the 2018 Guinness Book of World Records-setting event when more than 3,000 citizens gathered to play “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain” in an effort to restore train service between Andrews and Murphy.
“It’s not if we’ll get that train back—it’s when,” Ramsey says.
Murphy is a town with stories to spare: rich in history and myth as well as opportunity and come-back spirit. It’s a place well worth the journey. Mayor Ramsey says it best: “When we interview doctors to come to the Medical Center, here’s what I tell ‘em: ‘There’s no reason to look any farther—you’re already here.’”
A Must-See: The John C. Campbell Folk School
A few miles southeast of Murphy, in Brasstown, sits the 300-acre John C. Campbell Folk School, where for 95 years people have come to learn mountain art and crafts, music, dance and storytelling in a beautiful, noncompetitive environment. Over 800 classes a year are taught using the Danish folk school model, which founders John C. and Olive Campbell studied and brought to the North Carolina mountains. You live and breathe mountain culture at the Folk School.
Rand-McNally lists the Folk School as one of the top 30 “Best of the Road” U.S. destinations. Day visitors can visit the History Center, take in a free concert, hike the trails, spend money at the Crafts Shop, and visit the craft studios. Or you can spend a long weekend or a full week creating mountain beauty in mountain beauty.
Visit folkschool.org for more information.
Know a Great Blue Ridge Town Joan Should See?
Over the past two years Joan Vannorsdall has visited exciting small towns all over our coverage area (mountain regions of VA, NC, WV, TN, GA, SC, KY), and told their stories in these pages.
Do you know a small town that might be worthy of a visit? We’d love to consider your ideas. Please send to krheinheimer@leisuremedia360.com.
The story above appears in our May/June, 2020 issue. For more subscribe today or log in to the digital edition with your active BRC+ subscription. Thank you for your support!