Galax: World Capital of Old-Time Music

Galax didn't exist until the early nineteen hundreds, when a spur of the Norfolk and Western Railroad punched into these highlands. The original name is said to have been Bonaparte. A railroad official spotted a wagon piled with galax leaves, the evergreen plant that mountain people harvested by the millions for florists, and suggested the name instead. The town incorporated in nineteen oh six.

Thirty years later the Galax Moose Lodge needed to raise money, so they organized one night of fiddle competition. That was nineteen thirty-five. The Old Fiddler's Convention never stopped. It has run every August since, skipping only a few years. Today it draws tens of thousands of people to Felts Park and bills itself as the oldest and largest fiddlers convention in the world. The Scots-Irish and German settlers who carried these tunes into the Blue Ridge highlands would likely find that remarkable, and entirely fitting.