Montreat, North Carolina

Montreat sits in a narrow mountain cove east of Black Mountain in the Blue Ridge, and its entire identity flows from a single decision made in eighteen ninety-seven. That year, a Congregationalist minister named John Collins formed the Mountain Retreat Association to create an interdenominational religious retreat in the North Carolina highlands. Collins secured funding from candy manufacturer John Huyler, and the retreat took shape in the valley.

By nineteen oh seven the Presbyterian Church had assumed control, and Montreat became primarily a Presbyterian conference and education center. The evangelist Billy Graham and his wife Ruth Bell Graham chose Montreat as their family home, living here for decades. He died at his Montreat home in twenty eighteen and is buried at the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte.

The town, incorporated in nineteen sixty-seven, has a permanent population of about nine hundred, but tens of thousands of conference attendees pass through its single mountain road each year.