Watauga County: High Country of the Blue Ridge

Watauga County sits at some of the highest elevations in the eastern United States. The county seat of Boone stands at more than three thousand two hundred feet, higher than many of the peaks that pass for mountains in New England. The air here is cool even in summer, and in winter the ridges catch enough snow to support ski slopes that would embarrass most northern resorts.

The name Watauga comes from the Cherokee, most likely a word meaning beautiful river. The county was not formed until eighteen forty-nine, carved out of four adjacent counties, but the human history of this land goes back far deeper. The Cherokee kept seasonal camps and permanent towns throughout these ridges and valleys. Scots-Irish and German settlers began filtering in during the seventeen sixties, following Daniel Boone, who came not to settle but to hunt, camping in the area each season, lending his name eventually to the county seat.

Boone the town was incorporated in eighteen seventy-one and named formally for him. By then it was becoming a crossroads for the high country, the place where farmers brought produce and lawyers argued cases and circuit preachers gathered their flocks.

The institution that would define Boone in the twentieth century arrived in eighteen ninety-nine: Watauga Academy, which grew through several reorganizations into Appalachian State University. The university today enrolls more than twenty-one thousand students and anchors a college town at altitude, a combination that makes Boone unlike almost anywhere else in the South.

Watauga County is also the southern anchor of the High Country, a cluster of mountain counties that together contain Grandfather Mountain, the New River, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and Elk Knob. The outdoor drama Horn in the West has been performed here each summer since nineteen fifty-two, telling the story of Daniel Boone and the Revolutionary-era settlements, staged in the mountains where the story actually happened.