Black Mountain Downtown Historic District

Black Mountain sits fifteen miles east of Asheville, a railroad town that grew up around the 1879 arrival of the Western North Carolina Railroad. The depot went up in 1909. By the early 1900s, the town had become a mineral-springs resort stop on the Asheville-Salisbury line.

The downtown historic district—56 contributing buildings listed on the National Register in 2004—runs the range of late-19th and early-20th century commercial styles: Craftsman, Classical Revival, Art Deco, Art Moderne. The firehouse, designed by Richard Sharp Smith in 1921, now houses the Swannanoa Valley Museum, which keeps two floors of photos and artifacts tracing the valley's history. A hardware store dating back nearly a century still operates downtown.

Just adjacent to the district is the former Black Mountain College site, where Josef Albers taught, where Buckminster Fuller built his first geodesic dome, where Merce Cunningham and John Cage worked. The college left no campus—only the residue of what happened when artists gathered in mountain isolation and then scattered.

The reason to go: the firehouse museum, the hardware store that outlasted the century, and the knowledge that this railroad town once hosted one of the most radical experiments in American arts education.