Original Mast General Store

The building went up in 1882 or 1883, and by the early 1890s it was in the hands of the Mast family, whose name it still carries. In a mountain valley far from any town of size, a general store was the center of daily life, part supplier, part post office, part gathering place. People came for flour, nails, harness, cloth, medicine, and news, and traded eggs and produce across the counter when cash was scarce.

The store passed through the Mast family and other local hands over the decades, and by the 1970s the automobile and the modern supermarket had made the old country store nearly obsolete. Many closed and were torn down or left to rot. This one came close. In 1979 it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in the early 1980s new owners reopened it and rebuilt it into a beloved destination without stripping away what made it real.

Step through the screen door and the floor slopes and creaks under your feet. Old glass display cases and a long wooden counter still anchor the room, and the walls climb with cubbyholes and shelves. In the cold months a pot-belly stove throws heat, and there is usually a checkerboard nearby where regulars settle in, a scene that has changed remarkably little in a hundred years.

The candy is the thing children remember. Bins of old-fashioned penny candy line one section, scooped into a paper sack and weighed out on the counter. Around it you find outdoor clothing and boots, cast iron and enamelware, mountain crafts, jams and stone-ground grits, and the odds and ends of a store that still tries to carry a little of everything.

Valle Crucis means vale of the cross, a name given by an Episcopal bishop in the 1840s who founded a mission here where three streams meet in the shape of a cross. Long before that, the broad, fertile bottomland along the Watauga River drew the Cherokee and earlier peoples, who traveled and hunted through these mountains for thousands of years, and whose descendants today are enrolled in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians on the Qualla Boundary to the south.

The valley became North Carolina's first designated rural historic district, and driving into it feels like slowing the clock. Pastures run down to the river, barns lean against the hills, and the ridgelines close in green. The store fits the place because the place never overbuilt around it.

The store sits within easy reach of Boone, home to Appalachian State University, and Banner Elk and Blowing Rock, the resort towns of the High Country. The Blue Ridge Parkway runs along the ridges nearby, and Grandfather Mountain, Linville, and a string of waterfalls are all short drives away, which makes Valle Crucis a natural stop on a mountain loop.

Come in autumn and the surrounding hardwood forest turns gold and red, the busiest and most beautiful season in the High Country. Summer is cool and green, spring runs with wildflowers and rushing creeks, and winter brings quiet and sometimes snow to the highest of these North Carolina mountains.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.