news
Rafters splash through a rapid on a blue-skied day. NOC photo
WILD RIDE June 8-14, 2022
NOC marks 50 years in business
Smoky Mountain News
BY HOLLY KAYS OUTDOORS EDITOR n 1971, Payson and Aurelia Kennedy were living a successful, stable life in Atlanta. Payson was a librarian at Georgia Tech, Aurelia a schoolteacher. They had four kids, retirement funds, and the deed to their house. Then Horace Holden, an old friend of Payson’s from college and fellow member of Atlanta’s First Presbyterian Church, approached the Kennedys with a crazy idea. He’d just bought a little roadside motel in the Nantahala Gorge called the Tote ‘N’ Tarry, a 14-room complex that also included a small restaurant, gas station and souvenir shop. Holden wanted the Kennedys to help him run it. It was a big ask. The Kennedys had a good life in Atlanta, and their kids were nearing college age. They wanted to be able to offer them a higher education should they so desire. So they considered Holden’s proposal and gave him an answer: maybe. As a schoolteacher, Aurelia had summers off, so Payson took a leave of absence from work to give it a trial run. They spent the summer of 1972 living at the little outpost the three had decided to christen the Nantahala Outdoor Center. As the Tote ‘N’ Tarry, the outpost mostly 6 served anglers and tourists to the Great
The NOC campus looked much different in 1980. Donated photo
I
Smoky Mountains National Park, Qualla Boundary and Nantahala National Forest, as well as a small but growing contingent of paddlers and hikers on the Appalachian Trail, which crosses the property. The NOC’s founders envisioned more than a wayside stop for outdoor adventurers. They wanted it to become a home base for people who love the outdoors, the nucleus of a community dedicated to sharing in adven-
ture and giving others the tools they needed to safely do the same. They’d start out by serving both the general public and groups from Camp Chattahoochee, which Holden had founded, and offering food, lodging, shuttles, equipment and instruction for various recreational activities. Raft trips might be the best way to bring in the revenue they’d need to cover their mortgage payments, Payson suggested. The
others agreed, but they all said they wanted the center to offer a wide variety of outdoor activities — not just whitewater rafting. That first summer was nonstop work, but the work felt like fun. The NOC took about 800 guests rafting on the Nantahala, and another 400 on the Chattooga, with the Kennedys, their kids and most of the staff sleeping in a brick house Holden had purchased from the former owners of the Tote ‘N’ Tarry. The season represented a financial loss, but Payson and Aurelia believed the business could be successful. And they loved life on the river. The following fall, they made a decision that would change their lives, and the lives of countless others in Swain County and beyond. They sold their house, collected their retirement funds, and invested $25,000 in the business, permanently moving their family to the NOC campus.
A HALF-CENTURY OF GROWTH
Fifty years later, the NOC is still around, and not in the barely-hanging-on, relic-ofthe-past sense. It’s thriving. “We did not expect it to be anything of the scope that the NOC became,” Payson, now 89, said during a 2018 interview on the spa-
