Beech Mountain: The Highest Town in the Eastern United States
Near Banner Elk, North Carolina
You are climbing Beech Mountain, home to the highest incorporated town in the eastern United States, its center perched at five thousand five hundred six feet above sea level. The ski resort here was the dream of Doctor Thomas Brigham, a dentist from Birmingham, Alabama, who believed the South could support real skiing. He bought a large tract of Beech Mountain in nineteen sixty-one and eventually partnered with three brothers from Blowing Rock, Grover, Harry, and Spencer Robbins.
The Robbins family worked in sawmills and lumber but grew fascinated with resort development, and in nineteen sixty-five they joined other investors to form the Carolina Caribbean Corporation. To sell mountain land, the company built attractions to draw visitors, and Beech Mountain Resort opened for business in the winter of nineteen sixty-seven and sixty-eight. Its high elevation gives it some of the coldest, most reliable snow in the region.
When the Carolina Caribbean Corporation later collapsed, property owners banded together to preserve what had been built, and in nineteen eighty-one Beech Mountain incorporated as a town, reinventing itself as a quiet resort community. Standing more than a mile high, Beech offers sweeping mountain views, and in winter it can feel like a pocket of New England transplanted to the southern mountains.
