Valle Crucis: Valley of the Cross and the Country Store

Valle Crucis, Latin for Valley of the Cross, sits in a Watauga County cove where three mountain streams converge in the shape of a cross. The first settlers arrived around eighteen twelve, and the valley quietly became one of the best-preserved rural communities in the entire southern Appalachians.

In eighteen eighty-two, Henry Taylor opened a general merchandise store along the Caldwell-Watauga Turnpike. He eventually partnered with W. W. Mast, who took sole ownership in nineteen thirteen and gave the store his name. The Mast General Store is now on the National Register of Historic Places, known for selling everything from overalls to moonshine crocks, its barrels and bins largely unchanged from a century ago. Valle Crucis became North Carolina's first designated rural historic district, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the old Mast Farm Inn nearby, built around eighteen eighty-five, still takes guests in the same farmhouse where mountain families once boarded.