Real Estate & Lifestyle Posts in WNC

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 10, 2026

Drive down almost any back road in Polk County and you will pass it: rolling pasture in the thermal belt, cattle grazing on grassfed operations that run to 600 acres, rows of French vinifera climbing a hillside estate. This is farm country in the truest sense, and for a long stretch of years the hard part was not growing the food. It was getting it into the hands of the neighbors living a few miles away.

Appalachian Grown closes that gap. The program, run by the Asheville nonprofit ASAP, has become one of the tools Polk County residents rely on for finding, trusting, and buying from the farmers right down the road. It works because it answers a simple question that turns out to be surprisingly hard to answer at a grocery store: was this actually grown here?

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 9, 2026

There is something worth preserving in a pot of soup beans or a jar of apple butter put up for winter, and Balsam Mountain Inn in Haywood County is building an afternoon around exactly that. On Saturday, July 18, at 4 p.m., the inn's historian, Paula Rhodamer, will lead a class on Appalachian foodways and historic recipes, and every guest leaves with a recipe booklet they assemble themselves.

The inn sits at Balsam Gap, just off US-74/US-23 near the Jackson County line and a short hop from the Blue Ridge Parkway. It is about a 40-minute drive west of Asheville by way of I-40 and US-74, which makes it an easy afternoon outing whether you are coming from Waynesville, Sylva, or farther out.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 9, 2026

A Building That Was Barely Standing on Its Own Rock

The hardest part of saving the Jarrett House was not the paint, the antiques, or the woodwork. It was the ground underneath it.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 9, 2026

The best apple picking near Asheville is not actually in Asheville. It is a short drive south, over the Buncombe County line and into Henderson County, where about 80 percent of North Carolina's entire apple crop grows on ridgelines that catch warm days and cool nights. If you have spent an October wishing you could fill a bag straight off the tree, the orchards around Hendersonville are 30 to 40 minutes from downtown, and they have been doing this for well over a century.

That is the honest version of the story. Buncombe has plenty of things going for it in fall, but pick-your-own apple orchards are not really one of them. Blossom Ridge up in Weaverville is the notable exception. For the full experience, the corn mazes and cider donuts and rows of trees running off toward the mountains, you point the car toward Hendersonville, Edneyville, and Flat Rock. Locals have a name for the stretch of U.S. 64 that ties it all together. They call it Apple Alley.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 9, 2026

The stretch of Richland Creek running between Hazelwood and Frog Level in Waynesville is about to get a lot more walkable. The town council has approved a new section of the Richland Creek Greenway that fills in another missing piece of a plan locals have been chasing for more than twenty years: one continuous path along the creek, from the south end of town all the way to Lake Junaluska.

The new segment is short on paper, roughly 1,000 feet, but it does something the greenway has needed for a long time. It picks up where a previous expansion left off a few years ago and stitches two of the town's most distinct little districts closer together. When it is finished, the whole run connected to Dutch Fisher Park will stretch about half a mile of continuous, paved, lighted path.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 8, 2026

The house at the center of Cashiers' biggest late-summer event isn't even finished yet, and that is sort of the point. The Cashiers Designer Showhouse returns for its 29th year starting August 28, and this time the star is a brand-new 3-bedroom, 4.5-bath cottage retreat at 211 Frank Allen Road. The promotional image going around is a rendering, because construction crews are still working. By opening day, it will be a fully decorated home you can walk through room by room.

Cashiers sits in Jackson County, tucked into the southern mountains at the crossroads of US-64 and NC-107. It is about 65 miles from Asheville, roughly a 90-minute drive, and an even shorter trip east from Franklin. At around 3,500 feet of elevation, the town stays cool when the rest of the Southeast is baking, which is exactly why so many people make the drive up at the end of August.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 8, 2026

The French Broad River is older than the Appalachian Mountains it runs through, one of a handful of rivers that predate the continents settling into their current shape. And it starts here. Not near Asheville, where most people picture it, but in Transylvania County, at a quiet confluence near Rosman where the North and West Forks come together and become something bigger.

For years, paddling the full length of that river meant piecing together scattered information, guessing at where you could put in, and hoping the campsite you were counting on actually existed. That has changed. Over the past two years, the French Broad Paddle Trail has gone through a series of upgrades that make the whole 146-mile journey easier to plan, easier to access, and open to a lot more people than before.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 8, 2026

Whitewater Falls drops roughly 411 feet down the mountainside near the Transylvania County line, which makes it the tallest waterfall east of the Rocky Mountains. Locals call it the King of Waterfalls, and standing at the overlook, you understand the title. Water that started as rain on the Blue Ridge is falling farther here than anywhere else in the eastern half of the country.

That single waterfall would be a landmark for most towns. Brevard has around 250 of them.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 8, 2026

On the morning of February 2, 2001, roughly 900 people stood in the cold at a historic farmstead in Cataloochee Valley and watched something the southern Appalachians had not seen in more than 150 years. Twenty-five elk poured out of a release enclosure and back into the mountains where their ancestors once roamed.

For Kim DeLozier, the park's chief wildlife biologist, it was the moment everything came together. "When we released the elk, it hit me. This is the fruit of our labor," he said. "All those meetings. All those phone calls. It's worth it."

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 8, 2026

Nearly 120 people showed up to a town council meeting on a Monday night in Franklin. If you know Franklin, you know that does not happen.

The council chamber holds a crowd on a busy night. On July 7, it held 118 people, standing room only, most of them there for one reason. They came to tell their elected officials, in person, that they did not want data centers in Macon County. By the end of the night, the council had voted unanimously for a one-year moratorium on data center development inside town limits, and the room broke into applause.