Balsam Mountain Inn: The Highest Passenger Depot in the East

The town of Balsam, North Carolina sits at about thirty-three hundred feet in the southern Blue Ridge, and it holds a distinction that surprises most people who encounter it: for decades in the early twentieth century, it was home to the highest passenger rail station east of the Rocky Mountains.

The Southern Railway pushed its Murphy Branch line through the Jackson County mountains in the eighteen nineties, threading tunnels and switchbacks up to Balsam Gap. The elevation was part of the appeal for the railroad's strategy. Wealthy passengers from Atlanta, Charlotte, and the Deep South could board a train in July, ride upward through the heat, and step off at Balsam into mountain air fifteen to twenty degrees cooler than the city they left. No malaria, no swampy air, no yellow fever season. Just the clean smell of balsam firs and the sound of the Tuckasegee River below.

Walter Christy and Joseph Kenney, brothers-in-law from Athens, Georgia, recognized the opportunity. They broke ground in nineteen oh five and opened the Balsam Mountain Springs Hotel in nineteen oh eight, three stories of shingled and porched mountain architecture with a mansard roof of embossed tin. A hundred-foot double porch wrapped the upper floors so that guests could sit in rocking chairs and look out across folded ridge after folded ridge. Seven springs on the property gave the hotel its original name.

Guests arrived from the depot a short walk away and often stayed for weeks or the entire summer. The Southern Railway kept the line active through the nineteen twenties, but the automobile gradually made the long rail journey seem unnecessary. The hotel changed hands many times, closed, and fell into disrepair before a series of preservation-minded owners restored it beginning in nineteen ninety.

The Balsam Mountain Inn is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It still operates as an inn, still looks up at those ridgelines, and still sits within a short walk of the old depot platform.