Avery County was carved out of Caldwell, Mitchell, and Watauga in 1911, making it the last county the North Carolina legislature ever created. Tucked into the Blue Ridge near the Tennessee line, the terrain rejected easy farming and easy politics alike. Even during the Solid South Democratic era, Avery voted overwhelmingly Republican - a Civil War-era Unionist streak that never faded. The numbers are striking: since the county was formed, no Democratic presidential candidate has cleared forty percent of the vote, and in 1936 Alf Landon won Avery by nearly 56 points while losing North Carolina to Franklin Roosevelt by 47. The 1912 courthouse still overlooks Avery Square in Newland, the county seat, where monuments to fallen peace officers and firefighters share the lawn with a veterans memorial.

Walk into any garden center in November and you may already be holding a piece of Avery County. The hillsides here are blanketed in Fraser fir farms, the species native to these elevations and prized for soft needles and a fragrance that lingers for weeks. Trees are wrapped, stacked, and trucked across the country by the millions. The land also yields something stranger - large, doubly terminated quartz crystals threaded with clay inclusions, sought by collectors worldwide. Beef cattle and three vineyards in Banner Elk, Plumtree, and Linville Falls round out an economy stitched together from whatever the steep ground will produce.

The first full weekend after July 4, Grandfather Mountain hosts the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games - the largest Scottish Highland Games gathering in the United States. Tartans pour up the mountain road, athletes throw cabers, dogs herd sheep across the field, and bagpipes howl from MacRae Meadows at the base of the mountain. Three months later, on Beech Mountain, the abandoned Land of Oz theme park opens for Autumn at Oz, drawing fans of the 1939 Judy Garland film up a yellow brick road that has weathered there since 1970. Add Oktoberfests on Sugar and Beech Mountains, snow tubing at Hawks Nest in Seven Devils, and skiing at Sugar and Ski Beech, and the county's tourism economy runs nearly year-round.

Just under 18,000 people live here, scattered across roughly 250 square miles of ridgelines. Cannon Memorial Hospital in Linville handles the emergencies, and patients who need more get flown to Charlotte, Asheville, or Johnson City, Tennessee. Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, a Presbyterian-affiliated liberal arts school, anchors the higher-education map. For pilots, the Avery County Airport (FAA LID 7A8) ten miles southwest of Newland serves both Avery and Mitchell counties from a single paved runway opened to the public in 1962. The private Elk River Airport in Banner Elk sits beside NC 194, accessible only to residents of the Elk River Club community.