[piano intro] - [Deborah] Next on "North Carolina Weekend," we say hello [upbeat guitar music] from the High Country.

We'll visit the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum, go glamping in Asheville, and catch live music in Madison.

Coming up next.

[gentle music] - [Announcer] Funding for "North Carolina Weekend" is provided in part by Visit NC, dedicated to highlighting our state's natural scenic beauty, unique history, and diverse cultural attractions.

From the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains across the Piedmont to 300 miles of Barrier Island beaches, you're invited to experience all the adventure and charm our state has to offer.

[playful bluegrass music] ♪ [playful bluegrass music continues] ♪ [playful bluegrass music continues] - Welcome to "North Carolina Weekend," everyone, I'm Deborah Holt Noel, and this week we are exploring the High Country.

I'm in Blowing Rock at the Chetola Resort, a breathtaking 78-acre mountain retreat featuring an inn, a lodge, a spa, a restaurant, fly fishing, and so much more.

This is a great place to start my weekend here in the High Country.

Blowing Rock is a wonderful mountain town that's popular all year round with waterfalls, hiking, shops, great restaurants.

You name it, Blowing Rock has it.

One place this town is extremely proud of is the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum.

The locals call it BRAHM, and we sent Rick Sullivan to check it out.

Nice work, Elliott.

- [Rick] The Blowing Rock Art and History Museum sits in a garden-like setting on the edge of downtown Blowing Rock.

It's just a few steps away from the many small shops and eateries in downtown.

The statue in front is of Elliott Daingerfield, a prolific artist from a century ago.

He lived here on this same property in Edgewood Cottage.

It's Daingerfield's art that inspired the construction of BRAHM.

That all started with the Daingerfield celebration that brought folks to town for a weekend.

- At that weekend celebration, this man from Charlotte mentioned, "Oh, it's too bad Blowing Rock doesn't have an art museum, because if they did, I'd give them my Daingerfield art collection."

And he was overheard, and so that was just- - [Rick] Gotcha.

- [Sue] That was too good an opportunity.

- [Rick] So naturally, when BRAHM opened in 2011, Daingerfield's Art was and still is prominently displayed.

But his work is just a fraction of the treasure to be found in this 27,000 square foot space.

- What we've tried to do is present really, really top quality programming and shows and exhibits that tell our local stories.

And we always have a local angle on the story that we're telling - Because we are the only arts and/or history institution in the High Country, which is our kind of three-county pocket in northwest North Carolina, so when we switched to free admission in 2018, our role in this community changed where we became a community center.

- [Rick] The museum is relatively young, having opened in 2011.

Locals and visitors alike are still discovering what's inside, often drawn in by the park-like grounds and the building's architecture.

- It's got an angled roof that might be termed to be more residential in character, but that's also very much the character of downtown Blowing Rock.

We wanted to have a building that looked like it grew here.

- [Rick] Once inside, visitors discover a space full of the history and art for this region that had been underrepresented.

- [Willard] Blowing Rock has been a resort destination for over 150 years, and there have been artists that have been coming here, becoming inspired by the landscape, by the people and the culture here since that time.

- [Rick] More than 20,000 local and traveling visitors come through the building in an average year.

There are eight galleries to meander with attractions designed for a varied audience.

- Every one of our galleries has a young at art question in it that relates to the art or the history in that exhibit.

We always have an exhibit about history.

We always have a gallery that's full of beautiful landscape paintings, and then the rest of the galleries we like to mix and match.

We change our galleries over three times a year.

Our exhibitions are a variety of disciplines that go from American Impressionist artwork, landscape paintings, contemporary American craft, or something that's rooted in the history of our region.

- More than a century ago, Elliott Daingerfield worked and lived here in Edgewood Cottage adjacent to BRAHM.

These days, Edgewood Cottage is operated by the Blowing Rock Historical Society as a showcase for artists in residence during warm months and as additional museum space year round.

- The Blowing Rock art and History Museum is at 159 Ginny Stevens Lane in Blowing Rock, and they're open Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM.

For more information, give them a call at [828] 295-9099 or visit them online at blowingrockmuseum.org.

Just look at all these beautiful fabrics.

I'm at Mountain Thread Company in downtown Blowing Rock where artist Katherine Lile crafts beautiful baskets made from rope.

She offers classes in rope making and quilting, all aspects of mountain heritage.

Now a bit west from here in Macon County, there's an old elementary school that's been transformed into a new kind of educational resource.

Producer Clay Johnson takes us to the Cowee School Arts and Heritage Center.

- I come in here usually about three or four days a week.

It's open studio.

It's for people that are technically students.

You come in and work on your own projects at your own pace.

You can make things happen very quickly with a lump of mud and make it into a bowl or a pot.

[peaceful music] It's relaxing, it's creative, it's fun.

- [Clay] Bruce Marino makes clay creations at the Cowee Pottery School.

It's housed at the Cowee School Arts & Heritage Center near Franklin.

- The mission is to promote and preserve the teachings and the culture and craft heritage of the Southern Appalachians.

- [Clay] The center was originally Cowee Elementary School, the federal government's Works Projects Administration built the school in 1943.

It closed in 2012.

- When the building was no longer in use, the community rallied to save the building and had a vision and a plan for what it could be for the community.

So it became the Cowee School Arts & Heritage Center.

You can walk in and out of a room, and it's a totally different experience in each room that you go to.

- This is my personal painting studio, and I also teach painting lessons here.

This is a painting of the area around my birthplace and where I grew up, and these are fields that I've walked in, worked in, and become very, very familiar with.

- We are in a build a clock class.

And obviously, you can make a lot of things by hand with clay.

I teach surface design here at the school.

And what that is is different strategies for glazing or carving or stenciling or transferring to decorate pottery.

- I do leatherwork and also tree and woodwork.

I'm making little flip notebooks like this one in my pocket that holds little spiral binders.

This one has been pretty well used.

That's what I'm making.

- And this is a studio space but also a teaching space.

So I have looms set up for people that have never wove before so they can come weave a rug.

I am tablet weaving, and this is an ancient form of weaving, and I'm making hatbands.

You can also use them for straps or dog leashes.

- Okay, this is Down Memory Lane Toy Museum.

It's a collection of automobiles, pedal cars, toy trucks, 900 or so Studebaker toys.

The oldest toy we have in here is 1883 roller skates.

- We are in one of our ballet technique classes, and they are working on their leaps and turns.

They are from all over Macon County, ages 3 to 18.

- This is my wife's studio, Cynthia Cochran Kinard.

She loves to paint religious art.

She does everything from watercolors to oils to charcoal to ink to just a number of mediums.

- We are the Smoky Mountain Quilters Guild, and today we are hand quilting on this sweet quilt, going through three layers of the quilt.

And instead of it being machine quilt, we are hand quilting the design that's going to hold the three layers together.

- I centered the clay, and I opened it up and I wanna bring the walls up.

And we're making basically a cylinder.

I mean you see how quickly you can make something.

It's just a very friendly environment that people will welcome you here and work with you and teach you.

- [Clay] In addition to studios, classes, and galleries, the center will soon have a Cherokee museum.

The Cherokee were here in the Cowee Valley long before anyone else, so we really try to honor that history and culture that they've left for us here.

♪ Hang my head in shame ♪ [audience applauding] ♪ And I walk down ♪ - [Clay] The Cowee School Arts and Heritage Center also hosts festivals, a farmer's market, and a summer concert series.

It's a community hub but also a destination for anyone.

- [Laura] I think if you're out here to enjoy the area, the beauty of the mountains, you should definitely make a stop here and let us show you our culture, our heritage, why it's so important to us, why it's worth preserving.

- The Cowee School Arts and Heritage Center is at 51 Cowee School Drive in Franklin.

To find out more about their extensive schedule and events, visit them online at cowieschool.org.

Have you heard that glamping is camping done the wrong way?

Well some folks in Asheville embraced that, and they've opened an urban cabin campground right off the French Broad River.

Let's pay a visit to Wrong Way River Lodge and Cabins.

[birds twittering] - [Shelton] This is the Asheville that Joe and I love.

We selected this site specifically, because it's on the greenway, and the greenway runs along the French Broad River and connects all these different parts of town.

It's a place that Joe and I come with our families, and we just felt like this is our Asheville [gentle guitar music] and we wanna share it with people.

- My name's Joe Balcken.

- My name's Shelton Steele.

- And we're the co-owners of Wrong Way River Lodge & Cabins.

Wrong Way River Lodge & Cabins is a urban cabin campground.

We're situated three miles away from downtown Asheville, but we're also right across the road from the greenway and the river at the intersection of the outdoors and the urban amenities.

- [Shelton] I would say the design and the construction process are very reflective of a first-time project for Joe and I.

We were as hands on as the contractors would let us be, here every day.

And, you know, the site really dictated what kind of structures we could build and how we could tie everything together.

So most of our design decisions related specifically to problems that needed to be solved on the property.

All of our cabins connect on a single walkway that leads back to the lodge.

And that was a result of building two different walls to hold the hillside up, and then in doing so it created a path.

And so that's now our cabin trail and you walk on French Broad river stone to get to your cabin on this hillside walkway.

One of the design elements that we leaned really hard in on was that the cabins and the lodge were represented by the trees that were here.

When we took them down, we sent them to a mill that's about 20 miles from here.

That's the floor that that is in this room.

- [Joe] We also were able to repurpose some barnwood from a local youth camp down in Old Fort, North Carolina to make countertops and vertical members for the closets and the shelvings.

- But this is what the wood came in looking like and then this is what we did to it to make it into a countertop.

- We wanted to minimize the amount of new lumber material that we would source, so a nod to the sustainability value.

- Yeah.

- The story that I used to tell when I was on a whitewater rafting trip with commercial guests, the French Broad River is one of three rivers in the world that flow from south to north, the wrong way.

It was a great nod to a river that is such a big part of our business.

So Wrong Way became our name.

That Wrong Way name has kind of evolved to also encompass our approach to traditional concepts.

[upbeat music] We are not a traditional campground.

We created an experience called volun-tourism alongside all those other experiences that you can sign up for as a guest, the whitewater rafting, the tour through Asheville.

You can sign up for our volun-tourism experience, which essentially will allow you to get connected with some of the local nonprofits to work on local service projects.

- [Shelton] We've got an event space in the ground level of the lodge, and then we've got a small conference room upstairs.

So we have this kind of mix and match where people can work and then there's the greenway and the river.

They can get outside and have an experience.

I think if you do any kind of project in Asheville, you can take your idea and then share it with all these different artists that are in this town.

It always gets better once an artist reinterprets your idea.

Our wooden animal heads, that was a nod to a river lodge having dead animal mounts on the wall and doing it the wrong way.

We wanted to come up with something that was more playful.

And so there's an artist named Ben Grant, and those are the animal heads that Ben came up with.

And they were above and beyond anything that I could ever imagined.

- We positioned ourselves at that intersection of outdoors and urban, because it breaks down a lot of barriers to the outdoors.

And those folks that maybe wouldn't typically choose to be in a more traditional campground, maybe that allows them to more easily access the outdoors.

Maybe they'll take it a step further and eventually find themselves doing that whitewater rafting experience that they never thought that they would do - The Wrong Way River Lodge & Cabins are at 9 Midnight Drive in Asheville.

To book your stay, go to wrongwaycampground.com.

A little slice of heaven comes in many forms.

For those who love made-from-scratch foods, look no further than a little hotspot tucked away on a side street in Black Mountain.

It's called Open Oven Brunch & Bakery, where the food is fresh, the service is friendly, and the views are out of this world.

[upbeat guitar music] - My husband Steven went to school to get his culinary degree, and I got my business degree.

And we knew many years ago that we really wanted to open a restaurant.

- [Deborah] Steven and Stephanie Paulson are foodies from Wisconsin.

They now call North Carolina home, and have become partners on many levels.

They're married, they're parents, in 2012, they started a food truck together, and seven years later opened a brick and mortar restaurant on Church Street in Black Mountain called Open Oven Brunch & Bakery.

- There's like a sense of warmth with that open oven, and we just want it to feel really welcoming to people when they come in.

- Typically a restaurant I go to for the quality of food, right?

- It's consistent, it's just consistently delicious.

- [Deborah] That might be because it's all homemade.

[upbeat music] - We make everything from scratch here.

I mean, I think the only baked item we source out of house is gluten-free bread, and that's just 'cause gluten is everywhere in our place, 'cause we make English muffins, our buns, all of our bread.

- [Stephanie] And you will find in the dessert case, homemade pop tarts, cookies, brownie cheesecake, and some seasonal items.

- [Deborah] And that is just their baked goods.

- [Stephanie] We do shrimp and grits.

We do biscuits and gravy.

We do omelets.

- [Deborah] But these aren't your typical recipes.

- Just really making kind of unique dishes and with kind of a twist on the classics.

- [Deborah] Take for instance their many versions of Eggs Benedict.

- [Katie] The one we always get.

- 'Chokes on Eggs - 'Chokes on Eggs.

- That's what I say.

- 'Chokes on eggs has always been one of our more popular dishes here.

It's a homemade English muffin with some homemade pesto, topped with some eggs.

We do a white wine, rosemary Hollandaise, some fried artichokes, and a Gorgonzola cheese on top of that.

- [Deborah] Then there's their Fried Green Tomato Benedict.

- With poached eggs, goat cheese, chives, roasted pepper, Hollandaise, and some salsa.

- Our Chicken Waffle Benedict is probably, that one will give you a nap afterwards, but it's delicious.

- [Deborah] Two more varieties include the Alaskan Benedict with smoked wild-caught Alaskan salmon and a cream cheese and chive spread.

Plus their Low Country Benedict with pulled pork and slaw, both topped with poached eggs and their housemade Hollandaise sauce.

- [Stephanie] We offer vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options.

- [Deborah] And all can be enjoyed with either indoor dining or outdoor that offer spectacular views of the surrounding mountains.

But at night and during the warmer months, they strictly utilize their upstairs deck called The Bell Tower thanks to the site's history as a former Bell telephone office and the beautiful church bells that sound across the street.

- [Stephanie] We do a completely different menu from brunch, specialty cocktails, beer, wine.

We do small plates.

- [Steven] Ahi tuna fish specials.

- Pork chops, steak, and then we do some fancier, more upscale desserts.

- [Deborah] It's just one more way Open Oven is making a name for itself, a dining experience with views that are breathtaking and foods that are almost spiritual.

- I think it's the best food in Black Mountain.

- Open Oven Brunch and Bakery is at 102 Church Street in Black Mountain.

For more information, give them a call at [828] 357-8553 or visit them online at openovenblkmtn.com.

Of course, the mountains are home to all kinds of music from bluegrass to folk and everything in between.

If you're ever in Madison County on a Friday night, be sure to check out The Depot.

It's been the local jam spot for years.

[lively bluegrass music] - I wouldn't be anywhere else on Friday night except at The Depot.

- The Depot is free, open to the public, and welcomes visitors from everywhere to get a true mountain experience.

- The Depot is a local cultural icon.

Most of our pickers here have been coming for generations and been playing for generations.

And a lot of their families, when this was a real train depot caught the train here - In the 1980s, the Marshall Depot was gonna be torn down by Norfolk Southern Railroad, because the train didn't haul freight or passengers anymore here.

Mr. Jarrett's mother, Linda, got wind of it.

And she called her son who happened to be the chief law enforcement officer for Norfolk Southern Railroad.

She said, "Forrest, you can't let them tear down that depot.

That's where your daddy used to ride the train up from Hot Springs to visit me, to court me.

If it hadn't been for the depot, we never would've got together."

The end result was Norfolk Southern leased this building to the town of Marshall for $1 a year, and they appointed a committee to decide what to do with it.

And that committee decided to make this a music venue.

- Marshall has become known as an artist's community.

The old high school on the island was saved and turned into artist venues.

There's a public art project, murals and medallions throughout downtown.

There's lots of reasons to come to Marshall.

- The Depot is a community stage.

If you say you're a band, we'll believe you and give you a 30 minute spot.

Now we've had some hard 30 minutes go by a few times, but not many.

If you come to The Depot on Friday night, the music starts at seven o'clock, the doors open at six.

We've put on a band every 30 minutes and, believe it or not, we have enough local bands to be able to schedule about six different groups in the course of an evening.

You never know what you're gonna hear when you come to The Depot.

I tell people that we don't charge an admission, and if you don't like the music, we don't have to return your money.

- I would say a lot of it is older country music, but of course we get a lot of bluegrass and gospel and even to a little bit of blues.

- People have confidence in playing music here, and that's really appealing, especially to somebody who's played for a living.

I just felt all that soulfulness come out.

- It's a family friendly venue.

It's a good place for the kids.

They always have fun, and the audience is invited always to get up and and dance.

We have dancers that get up that are, one person comes to mind, she's 89 years old.

She has her dance shoes on with the taps, and she gets right up there and clog dances with the rest and has a ball.

- [Pat] We have people from all over the place come here, and they'll ask me what a cakewalk is.

And sometimes they think everybody's getting up to leave [chuckles] when it's a cakewalk.

It's $1 a person.

That's how we pay the light bill.

And you know, we'll walk around the room, and when the music stops, you stop.

And the number you stop on may be the very number that'll win you a cake.

- Five.

[slow country music] - [Pat] We also have a 50/50 ticket.

Basically you buy a ticket for a dollar, and at nine o'clock we draw the ticket numbers, and if you win, you get half of what's in the pot.

The most we've ever had in the pot was $500.

Can you believe that?

- [Logan] The fact that so many of the musicians here are native to the area and have grew up here and grew up together makes it a very authentic mountain experience.

I think.

- [Peter] This place is a treasure.

If you haven't been here, you gotta get here.

- You know when you come in here and the music starts and you cakewalk it or you get up and dance or you watch dancers, you know, you can't be down and out [chuckles].

I mean, because everybody's in a good mood.

We don't care who you love, who you pray to, who you vote for, who your daddy is, what you think about a pistol.

We love everybody.

Everybody's got a place here.

[audience applauding] - The depot is at 282 South Main Street in Marshall, and they have live music every Friday night.

To find out who's playing, visit them online on Facebook.

[upbeat music] Blowing Rock really does have it all.

And Appalachian Ski Resort is the perfect place to wrap up my stay here in the high country.

And if you're not into skiing, you can try ice skating.

I think I will just enjoy the views.

And that's it for tonight's show.

And remember, if you've missed anything in tonight's program, you can always watch us again online at pbsnc.org.

Have a great North Carolina weekend, everyone.

I think it's snowing.

[upbeat music continues] ♪ - [Announcer] Funding for North Carolina Weekend is provided in part by Visit NC, dedicated to highlighting our state's natural scenic beauty, unique history, and diverse cultural attractions.

From the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains across the Piedmont to 300 miles of Barrier Island beaches, you're invited to experience all the adventure and charm our state has to offer.

[piano outro]