g Yancey County

Downtown Burnsville.

SAM DEAN

Yancey County

BURNSVILLE | MOUNT MITCHELL

Yancey County boasts more than 600 working artists, including renowned glassblowers, metalsmiths, basket makers, painters, paper makers, potters, quilters, sculptors, and weavers.

It is also home of the largest telescope in the Southeast dedicated to dark sky research and recreational activities.

Combine the highest mountain peaks in the eastern United States with a growing and vibrant town center in Burnsville and you get premier alpine settings, rolling farmland, and experiences that go above and beyond.

The county is bordered by Tennessee to the north, while the southern border follows the Blue Ridge Parkway. Burnsville is the county seat, with 1,638 town residents. The county, with 11 townships, has a population close to 18,000. Asheville is just 35 miles to the southeast, and Johnson City, Tennessee, is 50 miles to the north.

An ongoing $25 million fiber optic upgrade is making fast and reliable internet access available throughout much of the community.

Mayland Community College offers state-of-the-art programs, including nursing, applied engineering, mechanical design, welding, and machine processes. The college is also home to the first International Dark Sky Association-certified Star Park in the southeastern United States, as well as a dark sky observatory.

MORE AT BEVERLY-HANKS.COM Learn more about Yancey County Humane Society in Burnsville and how you can help them meet their mission at beverly-hanks.com/ blog/nonprofit-ychs.

The Carolina Mountains Literary Festival is held in Burnsville each September. It began in 2005 and has grown to be a renowned literary happening with readings, workshops, plays, and seminars.

The Parkway Playhouse, founded in 1947, is the longest running community theater in North Carolina. It produces a wide range of shows and has a dramatic arts education program for children. The Burnsville Little Theatre also performs several shows a year.

Just a few miles from town looms 6,684-foot-tall Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Rockies, joined by four of the top 10 summits in the east. These peaks have a unique climate that is cooler and wetter than areas just 10 miles away.

Accessible from the Blue Ridge Parkway, the highest peak is surrounded by the 2,000-acre Mount Mitchell State Park — the oldest state park in North Carolina — which is full of invigorating spots for hiking, camping, picnicking, and outdoor education. Multiple trails run throughout the area, and the peak is capped with a modern observation deck and seasonal restaurant, offering a perfect perch for high-altitude sightseeing. The North Carolina High Peaks Trails Association maintains numerous hiking trails throughout the Black Mountain range, in which Mt. Mitchell is the anchor. Mt. Mitchell Golf Club is nestled 3,000 feet below the high peaks, offering rolling fairways with bentgrass from tee to green. The course received a four-and-a-half star rating from Golf Digest.

Numerous county communities offer access to either the North Toe River or the South Toe River, with stretches known for premium trout fishing and rafting.

The local arts council sponsors Toe River Studio Tours twice a year, when area artists open their studios to the public. Each August, downtown Burnsville also comes alive with the Mt. Mitchell Crafts Fair, celebrated for more than 60 years.

Burnsville’s square is anchored by the Nu-Wray Inn, built in 1833. The oldest remaining lodging house in the region, it has hosted such notables as Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, and Elvis Presley.

The Yancey County Library overlooks Burnsville in a remodeled 1901 building that once housed the Yancey Collegiate Institute –

2021 SALES Yancey County MEDIAN a college prep high school.Another YCI building is now home to the Lesley Riddle Recording Studio. Riddle, born in Burnsville, was an African-American musician whose influence on the Carter Family helped shape modern country music.

A nearby native rock structure built in the 1930s as part of a Works Progress Administration initiative is now the Yancey County Schools administration office.

Yancey County Parks and Recreation maintains a system of parks, recreation facilities, and open areas for public enjoyment.

One of the region’s most picturesque roads, Highway 80, meanders 12 miles through the shadow of the tall mountains. It runs by the Carolina Hemlocks Recreation Area, which offers some of the best easily accessible camping sites in the region. A noted motorcycle road, N.C. 80 also provides access to horseback riding, arts and crafts, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the golf course, and the European-styled Celo Inn, part of the Celo Community, a collective settlement founded in 1937. Families there adhere to a loosely defined humanist ethic and help run a farm and the Arthur Morgan School, a progressive middle school with roots in Quaker values and the Montessori educational approach. n

PRICE ........

$310,000

AVERAGE DAYS ON MARKET........... 149 PERCENT OF LISTING PRICE......... 94% NUMBER OF UNITS ............. 382 AGENT’S CHOICE: “My favorite locations to fish are those that are not in the ‘easy to get to’ locations. The South Toe River in Micaville and areas south are the best to fish for big brown trout. I call them gray ghosts. It is a place that by the time you get there, you have traveled from the hustle of life to the slow pace of the river with its eddies and deep holes.”

— Don Bell, NAI Beverly-Hanks

Mount Mitchell observation deck. The 14th hole at Mount Mitchell Golf Club.

The wonder from above | BARE DARK SKY OBSERVATORY

What was one person’s trash has now become one school’s treasure. Located in the Earth to Sky Park in Burnsville, the Bare Dark Sky Observatory has become a place of wonder and discovery for students of Mayland Community College and the general public.

“At night, the sky is just huge. You don’t often get big skies in the mountains here like you do out west, but it really opens up because the observatory is located on a knob,” said Margaret Earley-Thiele, foundation director for Mayland Community College. “When you’re up there, you get this huge sky to see those objects in the night sky — it’s surreal and makes you feel small in this universe.”

Initially, the vast property was a mica mine in the middle part of the 20th century, only to close and then be transformed into a landfill for Yancey and Mitchell counties. By the end of the 1990s, the landfill was reaching capacity, soon to be transformed into the EnergyXchange, which transformed methane from the closed landfill into energy to fuel artist studios and other projects onsite.

“But, eventually after about 12 years, the methane ran out and the EnergyXchange ended,” Earley-Thiele said. “The property was co-owned by Yancey and Mitchell County. They didn’t want to deal with the next step for the property, so they asked Mayland if we’d like to take over the management for it.”

For a period, Mayland Community College was using the property for extra classroom space, which included a horticulture program. As fate would have it, one of the MCC staff members was an amateur astronomer, who would go out to the property at night and gaze at the stars because of the immersive darkness atop the knob (a 360-degree view with an elevation of 2,736 feet).

“He told us there’s this organization — the International Dark-Sky Association — that certifies parks as Dark Sky Places, and that MCC could possibly get the certification,” Earley-Thiele said. “The president of the college told him to go for it and, two years later, we were certified — becoming the first Dark Sky Park in North Carolina.”

Aside from the gazing aspect of the park, attendees can also view the night sky through a large custom-built Newtonian telescope (the largest public telescope in the state) and small Meade planetary telescope. Mayland Community College also offers astronomy courses.

“What you can see through the Newtonian telescope is incredible — like the rings of Saturn and the gaps between the rings,” Earley-Thiele said. “It’s like you’re in a rocket ship looking out the window, viewing different segments of the moon and various star clusters.”

And with all of this cosmic exploration also comes an urgent need on planet Earth.

“A big part of our mission with the park is about dark sky education and really informing the community about why it’s important to have dark skies,” Earley-Thiele said. “It’s about preserving and protecting what’s above by mitigating light pollution down here on the ground, and how that affects the health of our environment.”

For Mayland Community College, the observatory is part of a larger picture the school is creating, this rural academic hub with resources and possibilities not necessarily found at most colleges and universities.

“We’re always expanding and evolving. This year we’ll also be opening a planetarium,” Earley-Thiele said. “We work really hard on community development and offering things that are unique to our area, and the observatory is one of those things that brings the community together.” n

ROBIN DREYER