Boone, North Carolina

You feel the climb on the drive in. Boone is at 3,232 feet, which doesn’t sound like much until you realize it’s the highest-elevation American town of any real size, and that the climb starts the moment you cross the state line and doesn’t stop until you’re parked on King Street. By the time you step out of the car, the air is sharper, the trees are different, and your phone tells you it’s seven degrees cooler than the temperature you left at the lake.

That elevation is the whole story of Boone. It’s the reason the town exists where it does, the reason the college ended up here, the reason the local culture leans more Appalachian than Southern, and the reason a college town of 19,000 has more dining and shopping than any town twice its size in the surrounding counties.

This page is about Boone as a place. If you’re looking for the day-trip itinerary (what to do hour-by-hour from a lake stay), we’ve written that up separately and it lives here. This page is the context.

A town named after Daniel Boone

The Daniel Boone connection is real, not marketing. Boone the man (born 1734, died 1820) hunted these mountains in the 1760s, including a stretch of camping at what was then called Three Forks, the convergence of three creeks where downtown Boone now sits. His nephews Jesse and Jonathan, sons of his brother Israel, were among the founding members of the Three Forks Baptist Church, which is still in town.

The settlement around the church grew slowly. The town was formally incorporated in 1872. The county is named Watauga, after the river, though the Watauga River flows through Tennessee, not Boone, which causes endless confusion with our lake an hour to the west. (The river starts in NC, flows north into Tennessee, gets dammed to form Watauga Lake. So the names are connected but the town and the lake are not next to each other.)

For most of its first hundred years Boone was a small county seat, lightly populated, mostly known for being the only real town in the county. The Appalachian State Teachers College arrived in 1899 and changed the trajectory permanently.

The university

Appalachian State University, called App State by anyone who lives here, is the dominant fact of modern Boone. The school enrolls about 21,500 students (more than the town’s permanent population), occupies a sprawling campus on the hill above downtown, and is the sixth-largest university in the UNC system. It moved from “Teachers College” to “Appalachian State University” in 1967 and joined the UNC system in 1971.

The athletic program is what most outsiders know it for. The Mountaineers football team won three consecutive FCS national championships in 2005, 2006, and 2007, and then upset fifth-ranked Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2007. That was the first FCS team ever to beat a ranked FBS opponent. The program moved up to FBS (the Sun Belt Conference) and has stayed competitive since. Home games are the loudest weekends in Boone; the town doubles in population for them.

Academically, App State has grown well past its teachers-college origins. Eight colleges, 150-plus undergraduate degrees, R2 research classification, strong programs in sustainable development, music, and outdoor education. The university’s footprint inside the town is large and walkable; you can park on the edge of campus and wander for an hour, and on a nice afternoon plenty of people do.

Downtown and King Street

King Street is Boone’s main commercial spine. About half a mile of brick storefronts running east-west through downtown, anchored at the west end by Mast General Store and at the east end by the App State campus. Park once, walk it end to end, and you’ve seen the working downtown.

A few names that are worth knowing as a first-time visitor:

• Mast General Store is the one stop everyone makes. Three floors of clothing, gear, housewares, and a candy counter inside the door. The Boone outpost is bigger and busier than the original (which is in Valle Crucis, 15 minutes away).
• Stick Boy Bread Co. is the bakery-and-coffee standby. Get there early on a weekend.
• Espresso News is the local-coffee answer if Stick Boy is full.
• Boone Drug has a working old-fashioned soda fountain. Order a milkshake and watch them make it.
• Anna Banana’s for ice cream when it’s warm.
• The Cardinal for a cocktail in the evening; small bar with a strong reputation.

There’s more besides: used bookstores, a vinyl shop, a few boutiques, several outdoor-gear stores catering to the App State crowd. The whole strip takes 90 minutes to walk if you’re stopping in shops, two hours if you have a coffee and watch the world go by from a bench.

The neighborhoods behind downtown

Most visitors only see King Street, but the residential streets just behind downtown are part of what makes Boone Boone. The Junaluska neighborhood north of King Street has the older houses: early-1900s frame houses with deep porches, well-kept gardens. South of King, Faculty Drive and the streets around it run up onto the hillside where a lot of the older professors live; the views from the upper streets are excellent. None of this is a tourist neighborhood; it’s just a pleasant walk if you want to see Boone outside the storefronts.

The newer residential growth is on the east side of town and along NC-105 south toward Foscoe, where most of the modern subdivisions and the rental cabins are. That’s where most ski-trip lodging concentrates. It’s also where the traffic gets thick on football Saturdays.

The dining standbys

The full day-trip dining writeup is in the Boone day-trip article. The short version:

Daniel Boone Inn is the institutional family-style restaurant of the high country. All-you-can-eat fried chicken, ham, biscuits, country sides, blueberry pancakes. Long lines on weekends. Not refined, but iconic. Kids love it. Open since 1959.

Local Lion is the lunch-counter answer. Brisket sandwich, breakfast plates served all day, a pastry case worth a stop on its own.

Vidalia is the proper sit-down dinner: modern Southern, reservation-friendly, the dressier night out.

Coyote Kitchen does Caribbean and Southwestern and is worth knowing about; Melanie’s Food Fantasy is the breakfast-and-lunch local favorite that you’ll see locals at more than tourists.

What Boone isn’t

A short note. Boone isn’t a destination city like Asheville. The downtown is small. The shopping is real but not vast. There aren’t museums to spend a weekend in. The whole working core of the town can be walked in two hours.

What Boone is, instead, is the most useful town within an hour of Watauga Lake. It’s where you go for a real coffee shop, a real bookstore, a real college campus to wander on, a meal that wasn’t grilled at the lake. It’s the high-country anchor, the town the rest of the surrounding mountain communities orbit around. For a week at the lake, one full day in Boone is right. Maybe two if you’ve got teenagers who need a screen-fix or a Target run.

How to drive there from the lake

US-321 east out of Hampton, through the gorge, across the state line at Cricket, up through Blowing Rock, into Boone. About 32 miles, 45 minutes in clear traffic.

There’s no faster route. There’s a longer scenic alternative on the Blue Ridge Parkway, but it adds an hour and the Parkway is closed in winter. For a typical day trip, stick with US-321 both ways. If you want the views, go via US-321 in the morning and take the Blue Ridge Parkway home out of Blowing Rock. That puts the Linn Cove Viaduct under your tires at golden hour, which is one of the iconic drives of the southeast.

For a week at the lake, Boone earns one full day. For two weeks, two. After that you’ve seen what there is to see, and the lake is more interesting anyway.

Related on the lake

• Banner Elk — closer, smaller, dinner town
• Grandfather Mountain on the route
• The full day-trip itinerary