The History of West Jefferson, North Carolina

Before the railroad: Ashe County's frontier

Long before there was a West Jefferson, the valley between Mount Jefferson and Paddy Mountain was hunting ground. The Cherokee, Creek and Shawnee all hunted, fished and fought across what is now Ashe County, following the New River and its forks through the mountains. Peter Jefferson — Thomas Jefferson's father — surveyed the North Carolina–Virginia line just north of here in 1749, and Bishop Augustus Spangenberg passed through in 1752 looking for land for a Moravian settlement. Daniel Boone hunted these ridges in the 1770s, and the first recorded land deed in the area dates to 1773.

The Town of West Jefferson dates the first ownership of this valley to 1779, when Governor Richard Caswell granted 320 acres to Colonel Benjamin Cleveland, the Revolutionary War officer who helped lead the Patriot militia at the Battle of Kings Mountain. Some local accounts give 1795 for a Cleveland grant instead. This page follows the town's date and keeps that disagreement in view.

Ashe County itself was carved out of Wilkes County in 1799 and named for Samuel Ashe, North Carolina's governor at the time. The commissioners bought fifty acres for a hundred dollars and laid out a county seat they called Jefferson — the first town in the United States named for Thomas Jefferson, who was then Vice President. For the next century Jefferson was the center of county life, with its courthouse, its stores and, from the late 1800s, the traffic from the Ore Knob copper mine to the east, at one point the leading copper producer in the country.

What Ashe County did not have was a railroad. Its timber, cattle and crops went out by wagon over mountain roads, and its farms stayed small. That changed in 1914.

The railroad that built a town (1914–1919)

The Virginia-Carolina Railway began as a short line out of Abingdon, Virginia. Its first train reached Damascus in 1900; by 1912 the rails had climbed to Whitetop, near the state line. Its steep grades, sharp curves and slow, laboring locomotives earned it the nickname it still carries: the Virginia Creeper. In 1914 the line pushed south into Ashe County, and rather than route through the county seat it laid its track and built its depot on open farmland two miles to the west of Jefferson.

The first train pulled into West Jefferson in February 1915. That same month — on February 9, 1915 — the North Carolina General Assembly chartered the Town of West Jefferson. The charter named Donnelly Blevins as the first mayor, with R. C. Barr, W. F. Hartzog, Isaac Faw and Amos Graybeal as aldermen. Behind the new town stood the West Jefferson Land Company, a group of investors that included hardware merchant Harrison C. Tucker, attorney and state legislator Thomas C. "Tam" Bowie, W. E. Menges and Elihu A. McNeill, who had bought up the land around the depot and platted the streets. The railroad continued fourteen miles further to Elkland, today's Todd, where the line ended.

The town filled in fast. Robert C. Barr built the first wooden hotel in 1915 and would go on to own sawmills across the county. The brick West Jefferson Hotel went up in 1917 on South Jefferson Avenue. Tucker opened West Jefferson Hardware, ran the Tucker Hotel and generated the town's first electricity; Bowie co-founded the First National Bank and Ashe Hardware. By 1919 the Norfolk & Western had bought the Virginia-Carolina outright, and West Jefferson was firmly on the map as the Abingdon Branch's principal North Carolina stop. North of Whitetop the old railbed is the Virginia Creeper Trail. The U.S. Forest Service currently lists the section from Damascus to Whitetop closed for reconstruction; see the Forest Service closure notice before planning a ride. The board-and-batten depot dates to about 1915 and was moved downtown in the late twentieth century. The restored caboose downtown is a reminder of the Virginia Creeper.

Boom years: timber, tobacco, livestock and cheese

Timber was the first fortune. The railroad triggered an unprecedented logging boom in Ashe County, and for the better part of two decades daily trains hauled lumber, tanbark and wood products north to Abingdon. Copper and mica ore moved along the same rails. The town's population climbed from 462 in 1920 to 704 in 1930.

But the boom carried the seed of its own end. By the early 1930s the accessible timber was cut over and the ore markets had collapsed into the Depression. In 1933 the Norfolk & Western abandoned the fourteen-mile stretch between West Jefferson and Todd, and West Jefferson became — literally — the end of the line.

Rather than fade, the town diversified. A livestock market opened in the 1920s and turned West Jefferson into a cattle-shipping point for the surrounding farms. Burley tobacco, barely grown in the county in 1920, was its biggest cash crop by 1950; a tobacco warehouse was built in the 1940s to handle it. And in 1930 the Kraft Corporation consolidated a cluster of small community cheese plants — at Grassy Creek, Beaver Creek, Sturgills, Crumpler and Ashland — into a single factory in West Jefferson. The Kraft-Phenix plant that still stands at 105 East Main Street was built around 1935 and was the only cheese factory of its kind in North Carolina.

The town's landmark buildings date from these years. First Baptist Church, in the Neoclassical Revival style, was completed in 1929. The Art Deco Parkway Theater opened on East Main in 1939 with a balcony and 430 seats. After the Second World War, manufacturing arrived: Barr's Phenix Chair Company grew to 280 employees by 1963, the cheese plant employed fifty, and by 1960 the population had reached roughly a thousand. The First National Bank's modernist 1962 building on South Jefferson Avenue now serves as Town Hall. The steam engines that had defined the Creeper for four decades gave way to diesel in 1957.

The last train (1977) and the hard decades

By the 1970s the Abingdon Branch had become an anachronism — a slow mixed train winding through the mountains a few days a week, beloved by railfans and photographers but losing money for the Norfolk & Western. Flooding damaged track and trestles along the line, and the railroad chose not to rebuild. The last train ran on March 31, 1977. The rails and crossties were pulled up soon afterward, ending sixty-two years of service to West Jefferson. In an odd piece of timing, the Ashe County Airport opened that same year, with a 4,300-foot runway.

The late 1970s and 1980s were lean. Textile and furniture jobs drifted overseas, the county's young people left for Charlotte and the Triad, and West Jefferson's population, which had peaked around 1960, slipped below 900. Downtown storefronts emptied. Yet the town never quite hollowed out. The cheese plant kept making cheddar, the Parkway kept showing films, and the compact grid of brick buildings that the Land Company had laid out in 1915 stayed intact — which would matter enormously later.

Ashe County Cheese: the South's oldest cheese plant

No single business tells West Jefferson's story better than the cheese plant. Kraft ran the factory from 1930 until 1975, turning out cheddar "daisy wheels" that shipped across the country. When Kraft sold in 1975, local operator Chesley Hazlewood took it on; in 1981 Jerry Glick and Doug Rudersdorf bought the business, remodeled it, and added something that would change the town's future — a viewing window where visitors could watch cheese being made. Almost overnight, the plant became one of the most popular tourist stops in the state.

Ownership passed through a series of investment firms in the late 1980s and early 1990s before Newburg Corners Cheese, Inc. bought the assets in 1994. In 2004 the operation split into two locally run businesses, the manufacturing plant and the retail store across the street, and the product line grew beyond cheddar to flavored cheeses and Juusto, a Scandinavian-style baking cheese. Today Ashe County Cheese — North Carolina's oldest cheese-making plant and widely called the oldest in the South — still anchors the corner of East Main Street, about a 7–8 minute walk from the Cozy cabin.

Faith and frescoes: Ben Long at St. Mary's

In the early 1970s a young North Carolina painter named Benjamin F. Long IV came home from Italy, where he had apprenticed in the nearly lost art of true fresco — pigment painted into wet plaster. He offered to paint one for free and was turned down by church after church, until he met Father J. Faulton Hodge, the priest-in-charge of the newly revived Parish of the Holy Communion in Ashe County, at a gathering in Blowing Rock. Hodge said yes.

At tiny St. Mary's Episcopal Church, a white clapboard chapel on Beaver Creek School Road at the edge of West Jefferson, Long painted Mary Great With Child in 1974 and John the Baptist in 1975, followed by The Mystery of Faith above the altar. They were the first frescoes Long created in North Carolina. In the summer of 1980 he and some twenty assistants spent three months on The Last Supper at Holy Trinity Episcopal in Glendale Springs, ten miles east.

The frescoes did something no one had planned: they brought visitors to Ashe County by the busload. Before the pandemic, the two churches were drawing as many as 50,000 visitors a year, peaking each October with the leaf season. Both remain open to the public, free of charge, and St. Mary's is open around the clock. For a town looking for a way forward in the 1980s, the frescoes were the first proof that art could be an economy.

The Arts District revival (1990s–today)

The turnaround began in the mid-1990s, when a group of community leaders decided that if West Jefferson could no longer be a railroad town, it could be an arts town. The West Jefferson Revitalization Committee and the Ashe County Arts Council set out to create a downtown Arts District, with funding from the North Carolina Arts Council, HandMade in America and local businesses.

The first mural went up in 1996: Jack Young's History of Ashe Through the Ages, painted for McFarland & Company, the book publisher headquartered in town. Others followed in quick succession — Robert Johnson's Spring Wildflowers on Mt. Jefferson (1998), DiNapoli-Mylet's New River Traditions (1998) at West Main Street and North Jefferson Avenue, Stephen Shoemaker's Cut at Devil Stairs (2001), R. T. Morgan's Somewhere in Ashe (2003), Wings and Things by Earle Klutz Thompson and Raines Thompson (2004), and Unity in Diversity, painted by DiNapoli-Mylet with local students in 2006. Today more than a dozen murals cover downtown walls, and the Arts Council's map turns a walk down Main Street into a self-guided gallery tour.

Galleries moved into the old storefronts. Within an eight-block downtown there are now well over a dozen galleries and craft shops, a monthly Gallery Crawl from June through October, and the Florence Thomas Art School, founded with a legacy from Ashe County painter Florence Young Thomas (1909–2007). In 2005 the Arts Council began the barn quilt program that has since put more than a thousand painted quilt squares on barns across the county. Boondocks became Ashe County's first commercially licensed craft brewery; the beer is now brewed at its Brew Haus. The town's old-fashioned Dr Pepper bottling plant, one of the last still using cane sugar, became a cult attraction in its own right.

The town invested in the streets as well. The West Jefferson Historic District — roughly the original 1915 grid, with a period of significance running from 1915 to 1957 — was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 5, 2007. Between 2012 and 2016 a streetscape project added curb extensions, landscaping, benches and decorative lamps, making Main Street the walkable, sit-outside-with-a-coffee kind of place it is today. The relocated depot and a restored caboose stand downtown as reminders of where it all began.

Christmas trees and Christmas in July

As tobacco declined, Ashe County's farmers found a new crop that loved the cool, high ground: the Fraser fir. Christmas tree farming took off in the 1970s and 1980s, and today the neat green rows on the mountainsides around West Jefferson are as much a part of the landscape as the mountains themselves. Ashe County is one of the country's leading Christmas-tree counties. Ashe County firs have been chosen for the White House Blue Room Christmas tree, including trees from Peak Farms in Jefferson in 2012 and 2021. The North Carolina Christmas Trees Association also documents a 2008 tree from River Ridge Tree Farms in Ashe County.

The industry gave the town its signature festival. Christmas in July, founded in 1987 to celebrate the Christmas tree growers, has filled downtown West Jefferson every July since with mountain music, crafts and, of course, Santa. It is still free, still volunteer-run, and still the biggest weekend of the town's year — see the events section of our West Jefferson guide for this year's dates.

Mount Jefferson and the New River

The mountain that rises directly over the town has its own history. Local citizens tried and failed to make it a state park in 1942 and again in 1955; the third attempt succeeded in 1956, after 300 acres were donated and another 164 purchased through local fundraising. The mountain was renamed Mount Jefferson in honor of Thomas Jefferson and his father Peter, who had owned land in the area. Its undisturbed red oak and oak-chestnut forests earned it National Natural Landmark status in 1974, and in 1999 the park was reclassified as Mount Jefferson State Natural Area, a mountaintop of trails, overlooks and rare northern plant species with views across both forks of the New River.

The New River itself is one of the oldest rivers in the world — geologists put it anywhere from tens of millions to more than 300 million years old — and it flows north, against the grain of almost every other river on the East Coast. In 1965 the Appalachian Power Company applied to dam it, a proposal that would have flooded much of the Ashe County valley. A decade-long fight by local farmers, landowners and conservationists defeated the dam, and in 1975 the state created New River State Park. The following year, 1976, Congress added the South Fork from Dog Creek to the Virginia line to the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, and in 1998 the New was named one of fourteen American Heritage Rivers. The fight to save the river is, in its way, the beginning of modern Ashe County: the moment the county decided its future lay in its landscape rather than in industry.

West Jefferson today

West Jefferson had 1,279 residents at the 2020 census, in a town of just over two square miles sitting at roughly 3,000 feet. It is the commercial heart of Ashe County and the gateway to the northern High Country. In 2025 the 1917 West Jefferson Hotel reopened after a full restoration, a century after the railroad built the town it stands in. It is, in other words, a town that reinvented itself twice — once when the railroad came, and again when it left. The murals on the walls tell the first story; the full storefronts tell the second.

For what all of this looks like on the ground today — the galleries, the cheese shop, the trails, the festivals and a month-by-month guide to visiting — see our guide to things to do in West Jefferson.

West Jefferson history timeline

1749

Peter Jefferson surveys the North Carolina–Virginia line north of present-day Ashe County.

1779

The Town of West Jefferson dates first ownership of the future town site to a 320-acre grant from Governor Richard Caswell to Col. Benjamin Cleveland. Some local accounts say 1795.

1799

Ashe County formed from Wilkes County; Jefferson founded as county seat, the first town in America named for Thomas Jefferson.

1900–1912

Virginia-Carolina Railway builds south from Abingdon, Va., to Damascus and Whitetop.

1914–15

Rails reach Ashe County; the first train arrives in West Jefferson in February 1915.

Feb 9, 1915

Town of West Jefferson chartered; Donnelly Blevins named first mayor.

1917

West Jefferson Hotel built on South Jefferson Avenue.

1919

Norfolk & Western acquires the Virginia-Carolina; the line becomes the Abingdon Branch.

1929

First Baptist Church completed.

1930

Kraft consolidates Ashe County's community cheese plants into one West Jefferson factory — today's Ashe County Cheese.

1933

Todd–West Jefferson segment abandoned; West Jefferson becomes the end of the line.

1939

Parkway Theater opens on East Main Street.

1956

Mount Jefferson State Park established.

1957

Diesel locomotives replace steam on the Abingdon Branch.

1965–75

Appalachian Power's plan to dam the New River is defeated; New River State Park created (1975).

1974–75

Ben Long paints his first North Carolina frescoes at St. Mary's Episcopal Church.

1976

South Fork of the New River designated a National Wild and Scenic River.

Mar 31, 1977

The last train runs; the Abingdon Branch is abandoned. Ashe County Airport opens.

1981

Ashe County Cheese adds its viewing window and becomes a major tourist stop.

1987

First Christmas in July festival.

1996

First downtown mural, Jack Young's History of Ashe Through the Ages; the Arts District takes shape.

1999

Mount Jefferson reclassified as a State Natural Area.

2005

Ashe County barn quilt program begins.

Oct 5, 2007

West Jefferson Historic District listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

2012–16

Downtown streetscape project completed.

Exploring the history from High Peak

High Peak is four A-frame cabins on High Drive, just above downtown West Jefferson. Nearly everything on this page is within a short walk or a short drive of your front door: the murals and galleries of Main Street, Ashe County Cheese, the Parkway Theater, the depot and caboose, and the trailheads of Mount Jefferson. St. Mary's and the frescoes are a few minutes by car; Holy Trinity in Glendale Springs and the New River are an easy afternoon.

Each cabin takes its name and story from a piece of the town. The West Jefferson cabin is a nod to the town itself; the Farm cabin to the Christmas tree farms and cattle country that surround it; the Nature cabin to the mountain and river; and the Cozy cabin to the hot tub and electric fireplace evenings that follow a day of exploring. For what to see and do while you're here, start with our guide to West Jefferson, the hike at Mount Jefferson, the murals and frescoes, and see what past guests have said in our reviews.

Visit: 7, 11, 19 and 25 High Drive, West Jefferson, NC 28694.

Frequently asked questions about West Jefferson history