Fancy Gap: The Pass That Got Its Name from a Dream

Fancy Gap takes its name from a natural break in the Blue Ridge, and the story behind that name belongs to a teamster named Ira Coltrane. According to local tradition, Coltrane, after hauling goods over punishing mountain paths, looked at this notch in the ridgeline and said he fancied a proper road right through that gap.

Travelers had been crossing this part of the Blue Ridge long before Coltrane's time. The Great Wagon Road, which carried Scots-Irish and German settlers from Pennsylvania south into the Carolinas in the seventeen hundreds, ran through this part of the Blue Ridge country. The Blue Ridge Parkway, begun in the nineteen thirties, later traced the ridgeline above the community. Then came Interstate Seventy-Seven, which climbs a long, steep mountain grade, bringing the modern world crashing up the mountain at seventy miles an hour. The gap has been a crossing point for three centuries of American movement.