Walker's Inn: A Stagecoach Stop in the Cherokee Corridor

Near Andrews in Cherokee County, North Carolina, a log-and-frame structure called Walker's Inn has stood since around eighteen forty. Squire William Walker and his wife Margaret Scott Walker built the house in stages on land they acquired in the mountains of western North Carolina. For decades it served as the main stagecoach stop along the route between Franklin and Murphy, a corridor that US Route Nineteen still follows.

The inn hosted a remarkable range of travelers for its remote location. The landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, then touring the South and taking notes that would inform his advocacy for public parks, stayed here during his travels through the region. Cherokee chief Junaluska, who had fought alongside Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in eighteen fourteen and later returned to North Carolina after the Trail of Tears, also stayed at the inn on multiple occasions. Walker's Inn was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-five.