Black Mountain, North Carolina

Black Mountain sits about fifteen miles east of Asheville in a gap where the Western North Carolina Railroad punched through the Blue Ridge in the late eighteen seventies. The tunnels that carried the railroad over the crest opened this corner of the mountains to outside commerce, and by the time the town incorporated on March fourth, eighteen ninety-three, it had already become a stopping point for tourists escaping the summer heat of the lowland South. Named for the dark range of peaks to the north, Black Mountain grew as a resort community and later drew artists and educators. Black Mountain College, the legendary experimental art school that produced Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller, operated nearby from nineteen thirty-three to nineteen fifty-seven, leaving an outsized legacy on American modernism.