Rock steady: a mountaintop refuge for centuries, Blowing Rock ranks among the state's most beloved and prosperous towns.

AuthorDodson, Jim
PositionTown Square

So what do you think of our new gazebo? It was just dedicated last week--just in time for summer. I think it's a pretty good symbol of who we are as a community." Perched on a wooden bench in Blowing Rock's beautiful Memorial Park while Main Street fills with hungry weekenders, Mayor J.B. Lawrence can be forgiven for sounding like a man in love with his day job. He's been at the post for 18 years, including five terms when he ran unopposed.

The Rock's new gazebo is indeed a thing of beauty, made of strong mountain timbers and topped with cedar shakes. It's roughly twice the size of the one it replaced that was built for the town's U.S. bicentennial celebration in 1976, the structural centerpiece of a town that almost looks too good to be true.

"The best thing is, that gazebo, it didn't cost the taxpayers a penny. Our Rotary Club raised $50,000 for it, and the community band donated another $10,000," he says, listing a stream of other local organizations and individuals that generously contributed to the project, which is good news for the incoming tourists. "Believe me, it will get plenty of good use for the next few months," during a string of annual festivals that will bring tens of thousands to the little town named for its famous, metamorphic gneiss rock jutting out defiantly over the spectacular Johns River Gorge, where the wind rarely gives pause and the weather is ever-changing. Lawrence mentions the annual Charity Horse Show (at 92 years old, the longest continuously running in the nation) that occupies the town this early June weekend and will return for a two-weekend run at the end of July into August; an Art in the Park festival that is held throughout the summer; and the town's annual Fourth of July parade and fireworks celebration. A few weeks later, the Symphony by the Lake at the Chetola Resort will place a fitting lyrical coda on the summer life of the little town that has been called the "Prettiest Town in North Carolina" and the "Crown of the Blue Ridge."

Indeed, at an elevation of roughly 4,000 feet and sitting astride the Eastern Continental Divide and the headwaters of two great rivers--the New, which flows north, and the Yadkin on a southerly line to the Atlantic--the source of Blowing Rock's prosperity has long been its weather and scenery. Among the first Europeans to set eyes on this summit was a Moravian bishop named August Gottlieb Spangenberg in 1752, leading a surveying party hoping to find a New Jerusalem in...

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