Julian Price Memorial Park: An Insurance Man's Dream Given to the Public
Near Banner Elk, North Carolina
At the foot of Grandfather Mountain, where the Boone Fork threads a wide valley, lies the largest developed recreation area on the entire Blue Ridge Parkway. Most visitors know it as Price Lake, they come to fish, to canoe, to camp in the shadow of the mountain. Few know the story behind the name.
Julian Price was not a romantic figure in the usual Appalachian mold. He was an insurance executive, the president of Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company in Greensboro, North Carolina. But he had a vision of what these mountains could mean to working people. Beginning in the nineteen thirties, he purchased thousands of acres in the high country along the parkway corridor, more than four thousand acres in this valley alone, with the intention of building a company retreat where Jefferson Standard employees could rest and recreate away from the city heat.
He never saw it built. Price died in an automobile accident in nineteen forty-six before the retreat was developed. In his will he left the land to his company, with a specific instruction: that the Boone Fork be dammed to create a lake in his memory. Jefferson Standard honored both terms. They completed the dam, creating Price Lake at about forty seven acres and a depth of eighteen feet, and then donated the entire four-thousand-acre tract to the National Park Service for permanent public use.
The stipulation about the lake is what makes this story unusual. The man wanted to be remembered by a body of water in the mountains, not a building, not a foundation, not a scholarship, but a lake. And so there is a lake.
Price Lake sits directly adjacent to Moses Cone Memorial Park at milepost two-nine-four, and together these two donations make up the largest privately donated recreation parcel on the parkway. The land that two very different Gilded Age and New Deal-era businessmen set aside for pleasure and restoration is now open to every passing driver who pulls off at milepost two-ninety-six-point-seven.
