It began with three names: Blanford B. Dougherty, his brother Dauphin D. Dougherty, and Dauphin's wife Lillie Shull Dougherty. In 1899, the Dougherty brothers led a group of Watauga County residents in raising money to build a teachers' school. Their father Daniel donated the land. J. F. Hardin contributed more. A $1,000 wood-frame building went up that fall, and 53 students enrolled in three grades. They called it Watauga Academy. Blanford served as the institution's president from its founding through 1955 - a 56-year tenure that shaped the university's identity well before North Carolina's public system absorbed it. The school joined the University of North Carolina System in 1971.

The main campus today spreads across 410 acres in Boone, with 20 residence halls, 30 academic buildings, and a total holding of 1,300 acres. The center of student life is Sanford Mall - an open grassy quad between the student union, Central Dining Hall, and the Carol Grotnes Belk Library. Sanford Hall, on the mall's edge, is named for Terry Sanford, the former North Carolina governor. Rivers Street splits the campus east-west, connected by tunnels and a pedestrian bridge. From the summit of Howard Knob above town, the whole university looks like a mountain village built by accident - red brick, slate roofs, and football stadium tucked into the folds of the Blue Ridge.

The football story is the one outsiders remember, but it didn't start with Michigan. Between 2005 and 2007, the Mountaineers won three consecutive Division I FCS national championships - the first FCS team ever to do so since the playoffs began in 1978. They beat Northern Iowa, Massachusetts, and Delaware in those three title games. It was the first Division I program to win three straight at any level since Army did it in 1944, 1945, and 1946. The Michigan game came at the start of the 2007 season; later that fall, App State would win their third title. The program moved up to FBS in 2014 and won six straight bowl games from 2015 through 2020.

The Carol Grotnes Belk Library, opened in 2005 in a 165,000-square-foot, five-story building, holds nearly 1.9 million bound volumes and 1.5 million microforms. Its special collections include the W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection - one of the most comprehensive archives of Appalachian culture anywhere - and the Stock Car Racing Collection, which contains donations from the family of NASCAR legend Richard Petty. The Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, opened in 2003 on the campus edge, is the largest visual arts center in northwestern North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and southwestern Virginia. The university also operates a 67-acre nature preserve dedicated as a State Natural Area in 1999.

Sitting on the highest point on the App State campus is a 100-kilowatt wind turbine, 153 feet tall, installed in 2008 at the Broyhill Inn site to test industrial-scale wind generation in mountain terrain. It has produced over 311,000 kilowatt-hours. Frank Residence Hall and Mountaineer Residence Hall both hold LEED Gold certifications. Mountaineer Hall runs hot water from a 40-panel solar thermal array. The AppalCART provides no-cost public transit between campus and surrounding Boone. App State has signed multiple climate commitments and received the Climate Leadership Award from Second Nature and the USGBC in 2015. Today the university enrolls more than 21,500 students across eight colleges, with a second campus opened in Hickory in 2023.