Nestled in the heart of Appalachia.

The University of Virginia's College at Wise is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.

[bagpipe music playing] [Joshua Deel] During the 18th century, over a quarter million people immigrated from the Northern Ireland area of Ulster to the original 13 American colonies.

Many went to Pennsylvania, others south into Virginia, the Carolinas, and across the American South.

But a large concentration settled in the Appalachian region.

Many were fleeing warfare and its accompanying economic hardships, as well as religious persecution.

Seeking salvation via immigration, as it were, was the only option for many.

The mountains of Appalachia reminded them of home.

The first European settlers arriving in Carroll County were primarily Scots-Irish pioneers.

They got to work right away with a variety of agricultural and mining activities.

And if you listen closely, you can still hear their music echoing throughout the mountains today.

[bagpipe tunes playing] [upbeat music] I've heard it said, "Where we are affects who we are."

And I think we have the chance to understand ourselves better if we understand where we come from.

Hi, my name's Josh, and I'm producing this series with PBS Appalachia to explore the towns that so many people still call home, their hometown, to unearth remarkable stories and the people behind them.

Hometowns is about exploring the communities that make small-town America unique.

This season, I'll take you on a journey off the beaten path through Southwest Virginia.

And don't get me wrong, this place has its warts, but if that's all I showed you, you'd miss out on the remarkable beauty of its natural wonders and the rich depth of its cultural heritage that, in a sense, are at the heart of what it means to be an American.

[♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] Hillsville is the county seat of Carroll County and was also home to the prominent American entrepreneur George L. Carter, born right here in Hillsville, and is known as "the empire builder of Southwest Virginia."

His ventures led to the modernization of many parts of the southern Appalachian region during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including both land grants and seed money to fund the establishment of East Tennessee State University, as well as the development of the city of Kingsport, Tennessee.

Although a very private person, he was a major player in the rail and various mining industries at the time, including coal, iron ore, and sulfur that was used quite heavily in the industry.

His historic home is on display to this day in Hillsville.

While exploring downtown Hillsville, I got a chance to talk with a couple of locals about what it's like living here.

-I grew up in Hillsville, and then I moved out to Sylvatus, which is still considered Hillsville.

It's so small they don't even have a zip code, so we are still considered Hillsville.

I've lived there ever since I was in 6th grade.

And then I actually bought a house just two miles away from my parents because I love it out there so much.

I mean, you have views of the mountains, you have creeks, you have rivers; I mean, you have a little wildlife.

It's just very beautiful and peaceful and calm.

Carroll is a big county.

It's divided among a bunch of different other towns.

My husband works in Woodlawn, so we have Woodlawn, and then you've got Laurel, and you got Laurel Fork, you got Dugspur, Sylvatus, you have Fancy Gap, Cana, which Cana is like right on the border of Virginia and North Carolina.

Carroll, it is kind of like a retirement community.

I mean, a lot of people from up north or down south will come here when they retire because of the scenery.

I mean, it's a beautiful place to live.

It's quiet.

You don't have to worry about locking your cars at night.

I mean, you don't have to worry about the crime.

And it's like a little piece of, like, paradise, you know.

And I love it too.

That's the reason I ever moved because, I mean, where else can you-- [Tiffannie Long] --not lock your door at night.

-[Amanda Dalton] Yeah, sure.

You don't have to lock your door.

I mean, you don't have to lock the car.

[Tiffannie Long] You can leave your keys in your car.

[Amanda Dalton] You can trust your kids to walk down Main Street and not have to worry about them, like, getting kidnapped.

[Joshua Deel] For the same reasons they want to move and retire here.

[Amanda Dalton] Right.

I mean, it's just a great place to live.

[Joshua Deel] It's a good place to raise a family.

Yeah.

I mean, you're finding work too, right?

-[Amanda Dalton] Yeah.

[Joshua Deel] There's work here.

[Amanda Dalton] Oh, yeah, there's plenty of work here.

During Labor Day weekend, our population count is as big as Miami because we have the largest flea market in the world.

Like, it's in the Guinness Book of Records.

So, I mean, it's huge.

[laughs] They, like-- you can't even get through town.

I mean, there are people everywhere.

[Tiffannie Long] They shut school down for it.

[Amanda Dalton] Yeah.

All the whole-- everybody that works does not go to work on Fridays or Monday.

-You can't get through.

-[Joshua Deel] Oh, my gosh.

Close the town down.

-Yeah, it's huge.

-So, do you find anything good there?

Do you ever go yourself?

-Oh, yeah, the food.

-[Tiffannie Long] The food.

- [Joshua Deel] The food?

-Yes.

[laughter] [♪♪♪] [Amanda Dalton] Galax is its own city.

You have Carroll, Galax, and Grayson.

And so we're like the tri-county.

But Galax is a rival when it comes to sports with the high school.

So, sometimes we'll claim 'em, but when it's sports season, we are not claiming Galax.

-Yeah.

[Amanda Dalton] I'm a Virginia Tech fan because this is the home of Frank Beamer.

He actually lived in Fancy Gap, and there's actually a sign out there that even says, "Home of Frank Beamer," so that's pretty awesome.

-Yeah.

He was the head coach at Tech?

-Yeah.

-Why are y'all here?

Why are you still here?

Why Carroll County?

-Well, I was born and raised here.

My family's here, and my best friends are here.

And I have no reason to leave because I'm happy.

I've got a great community.

I have a great church.

I mean, I love it here.

[Tiffannie Long] I came back.

It's a good place to raise kids.

I moved away for a while, and I was not comfortable raising children not here.

They're a lot safer here.

[Amanda Dalton ] Yeah.

I could go anywhere and go out on vacation, and as soon as I start seeing the mountains, like I'm instantly like, "Oh, I'm finally home."

It's just a good feeling.

And I love traveling.

I love going to other places, but there's nothing like when you're coming home, and... you're home.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

It's pretty awesome.

[Joshua Deel] Despite my early impressions of Carroll County being somewhat of a retirement bedroom community, people like Amanda and her friend Tiffannie prove it has broad appeal, even to those still in the middle of their careers and raising families.

Although it's true Hillsville made headlines over a century ago for its infamous courthouse shootout, there's more to this place, to this county and its history, than themes from the Wild West.

Carroll County extends below the mountain, an area now known as the Blue Ridge Escarpment.

With an elevation drop of more than 1,000 feet, it's more akin to Virginia's Piedmont than to Appalachia.

But I wanted to see this part of Carroll County for myself.

During my time here in Carroll, I get the distinct feeling of a small-town vibe, much like Mayberry, in that it's relatively quiet, missing most of the hustle and bustle of cramped metro life, but not without its own characters.

So it's not surprising to me that this same sense I'm feeling today is what likely inspired one of the most enduring television shows of the 1960s, The Andy Griffith Show, whose lead character, Andy, his real-life family grew up right here in this area.

I was fortunate enough to speak with a local author who filled me in on more details about that backstory and more.

-I grew up in Ararat, Virginia.

My father was the principal in Patrick County for 30 years at Red Bank and at Blue Ridge.

Blue Ridge is elementary school still.

It's where Bob Childress, "The Man Who Moved a Mountain," went to school, and Orelena Puckett, the midwife you see on the parkway, she lived there.

And of course, Jeb Stuart, James Ewell Brown Stuart, is from Ararat.

So we've got all three of them in Ararat.

Andy Griffith's mother was from Ararat.

A lot of people don't know that.

But they came to Ararat in 1959, and the thing my mother quickly discovered about Southwest Virginia is, everybody is related to everybody except us.

So be careful what you say, because you're probably talking to somebody's first cousin.

The Mayberry Trading Post, you know, the Mayberry Presbyterian Church that Bob Childress, he didn't build it, he rocked it, you know, the man who moved a mountain.

I grew up living about a mile from his grandson, Stuart, who also became a Presbyterian preacher.

But, you know, they always asked, "Did Andy Griffith get the name Mayberry from the community Mayberry?"

And I think he did.

I've written a book about Andy Griffith.

I've been to his papers at Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina.

And in his papers is this book by Jerry Bledsoe where they talk about bicycling the Blue Ridge Parkway, and one of the places he stops is the Mayberry Trading Post.

And he goes in to see Miss Addie Wood, who's gone now but lived to be, goodness, probably 100 years old.

And she tells Jerry Bledsoe that she remembered Andy Griffith as a little boy coming in there to trade with his grandfather.

I think his grandfather brought in ginseng and got, you know, groceries or whatever.

They didn't live that far from it.

And she remembered him.

And this always struck me as-- that Andy has this in his papers at Chapel Hill, and he doesn't say, "No, this didn't happen."

He's actually got it highlighted, and he's got Bledsoe's book.

So I took that to mean, "Yes, this is where I got the name Mayberry," because his mother was from Patrick County.

And I think sometimes we let the state line be a Berlin Wall almost, because I grew up in Ararat, but we came to Mount Airy to go to church and get groceries.

The state line is not the barrier then or now that people seem to think it is sometimes.

And I think a lot of people in the western end of Patrick and Carroll, you know, below the mountain, went to Mount Airy.

And I think Andy really did get the idea for the name Mayberry from the Mayberry Trading Post and the church, and you'll have a hard time ever dissuading me from believing that.

Andy Griffith took a lot of what he saw growing up to television, there's no doubt about it, talking about the Hillsville shootout .

Well, the Allens and the Goads, you know, there's episodes of the Andy Griffith Show where we're feuding and shooting at each other.

I think that's just part of the culture in a way.

And I think that's imparted into the show.

Otis and the alcohol, that's all in there.

My father actually was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and they moved to Mount Airy when he was a teenager.

And they came to Mount Airy because my grandmother knitted socks, and my grandfather fixed the machines that they knitted the socks on.

And my grandfather, he had a drinking problem.

And he liked to, especially when he got older, he would like to go up on Main Street to the pool hall and the taxi cab place there at Mount Airy, and he liked to have him a Schlitz or a Pabst Blue Ribbon or Budweiser, smoked Lucky Strikes with no filter.

I have a vivid memory.

He lived till I graduated high school.

He died two weeks after I graduated high school.

And my grandfather would get a big old snootful, and he would come walking down Pine Street.

He lived about two blocks from Main Street.

And they would call my grandmother and tell her that he was coming down the street.

Well, I was the oldest grandchild and I have a cousin, Todd, who's a doctor, who's about 10 years younger than me.

And Todd got to do this too.

Our job was we walked up Pine Street and we met Granddad, and we helped Granddad get back home.

And he was drunk.

And for this, you would get him there back into the apartment that he lived in, in the Graves House, they called it.

It's beautiful, been restored now, but he lived in an apartment.

And Granddaddy would reach in his pocket and he'd give you a Kennedy half dollar every time you helped him home.

When, when the, or as my father called him, when the old man died, that's how he called his father, the old man.

When the old man died, I had a box full of Kennedy half dollars, and so did my cousin Todd.

But just to show you, though, you know, I don't think my grandpa was Otis, but I'm sure there were other Otises around Mount Airy when Andy grew up.

[♪♪♪] Around here, you know, we got lots of people who are great storytellers.

And I always tell people, the best thing you can do is find the oldest person you know, and take your cell phone and hit that voice recorder button and just sit and talk to 'em.

You'll be amazed what you will find out, talking to the oldest person you know.

I've done it for years, and that's how you keep it going.

Because they will tell you things that you had no idea.

Or they'll whip out pictures or whatever and tell you stories.

I've gotten a lot of what I know from doing that.

Well, I can't think, I can't really imagine having a better growing up than I did, because I was a kid who wasn't related to anybody.

I came in, and the locals embraced me and my family.

And I got to grow up with some incredible storytellers and some incredible people.

And you know, what's that old thing they do at Virginia Tech now?

"This is Home."

You know, it's pretty cool to be from Mayberry.

You know, some people kind of scoff at that idea, but I think it's pretty cool to be from a place that's-- I mean, I don't know about other places, but our TV show's on every day since 1960.

How about yours?

[Joshua Deel] I think Tom and others here in Carroll County are on to something.

Being from a place like Mayberry is pretty cool.

It may be a slower pace of life for some.

But for others, it's the community that makes life so rich.

Like earlier, when filming in the streets of Galax, a young man chased us down to tell us we needed to meet and film someone who's made a huge impact on his life and others in the local music community-- his teacher, Eddie.

[country instrumental music] -I grew up just about ten miles from here over in the little town of Fries, Virginia.

And we're here at the Galax Fiddlers' Convention, the world's biggest and oldest convention.

I've been coming here all my life.

I play old-time as opposed to bluegrass.

I'm not opposed to bluegrass, but-- [laughs] And I have been known to play a bluegrass tune or two in my life, but I always wash my fiddle when I get done, so.

I teach at Grayson County High School, and I teach a string band class up there, which is a lot of fun because I get to teach traditional music the way I learned it, you know, not off of a piece of paper but one-on-one.

And I like it.

I think it works better that way.

Some things you can't write down, you know.

There's a song or a tune for everything, you know.

And that's one thing I've always loved about music because if you're feeling down, you can pick up your fiddle and, you know, play a little tune.

It might make you feel better.

Sometimes you just want to play a mournful tune, you know.

And that might make you feel good.

But it's always been a big help to me in my life.

My family's been here since the Revolutionary War.

So, if you're from Grayson or Carroll County, I'm probably kin to you somewhere.

Literally, the Bond family started in Carroll County, and they moved to Fries in the early 1900s because of the cotton mill, the way most of the rest of my family did, except for the Hill family.

They were already there.

So I have connections all over.

But we're real proud of Fries.

You know, there was a lot of good musicians that come out of Fries and worked in the old cotton mill down there.

As a matter of fact, one of the very first recording artists ever, Henry Whitter, worked in the cotton mill in Fries.

And he, some folks say, was the first country music recording artist.

It's a little bit of a conflict between him and John Carson because actually Henry recorded before John Carson, but his record was not released first.

So John Carson had that going for him, but really, Henry Whitter was the first one to go to New York and record.

And really, because he went to New York and did that, then other folks started going, like the Stoneman family from here in Galax, Pop Stoneman, who by the way, also worked in the cotton mill in Fries.

They went and recorded, and other people went and recorded.

That's what got Ralph Pierce's interest sparked, and that's why he came to Bristol and there was a Bristol Session, which they now call The Big Boom of country music.

None of that would have ever happened without Henry Whitter, and he barely gets mentioned as a footnote.

This area, we call it the Twin Counties, Carroll and Grayson County.

As a matter of fact, the line runs right through the middle of Galax.

So Galax is part Carroll and part Grayson.

I'd say that the Twin Counties are, you know, we love our music, we love our traditions.

It's a friendly place.

It's a great place to come in the summertime.

We have fishing and camping places, and the New River is a great place to come rafting or tubing.

And then, of course, we have the music, and really that's what I feel like old-time music is all about, is community.

Because as a friend of mine says, "You know, we make dozens of dollars playing this old-time music."

So you don't do it for the money.

[laughs] You do it because you like to do it.

You love the music and you love the people, and that's the main reason.

[applause and cheering] [Joshua Deel] The desire to teach and preserve musical heritage, as Eddie is doing, isn't an isolated endeavor by a sole teacher.

In fact, it dovetails with the efforts of others in the county who are also former teachers working to preserve the history and heritage of the area.

[Shelby Puckett] I'm a transplant.

I came to Hillsville in the fall of 1964 to teach school, and I've stayed here ever since, married, raised my family here.

I've been here ever since.

Worked 35 years in the school system, retired.

Very interested in history.

It was one of the subjects that I taught.

And in 1982, was fortunate enough to go to Richmond with the then mayor of Hillsville, and the conversation came around to Carroll County does not have a historical society, and all the counties around us do.

And so, when we came back, the first thing I did was write to the Board of Supervisors and ask if we could use this room to organize a historical society.

[Bill Webb] I grew up in Hillsville, born in 1949.

Have a family on both sides, my father's side and mother's side, that goes back quite a few generations and that sort of thing.

And I was told by one of my grandmothers that Carroll County was formed by one of my great-great-great- who-knows-how-many uncles, and the story being that he was a legislator in the state of Virginia.

His political opponent didn't really like the idea of this being named for him, but as an aside, they agreed that Carroll County was actually named for John Carroll, who was the signer of the Declaration of Independence, and so it became Carroll County.

-And the name stuck.

-Yeah, and the name stuck.

I grew up here in this small town at a time when you could leave the home first thing after breakfast in the morning and your instructions were, "Show up before it gets dark."

And, you know, us kids could bicycle around, play around, go fishing, do whatever, and our parents didn't worry about it.

Most people didn't even lock their front doors.

If they did lock the front door, the back door was always unlocked.

It was just a small-town environment, and everybody knew everybody.

And Hillsville hustled and bustled quite a bit in those days.

And as I grew up, got to an age where I could work, I worked in a local grocery store and that sort of thing.

And then, after I graduated from high school, I went to Virginia Tech for four years, got a degree in engineering, and that led me away from Hillsville.

I worked for the Veterans Administration for 35 years, partially in D.C. and partially in other parts of the country.

And then, once I retired, decided to move back here, build a home on some family property.

In the early days, even before this became Carroll County, there was mining that took place across the northeast to northwest corners of Carroll County and arced to a degree into Wythe County, the area around Austinville and that sort of thing.

And you may have traveled on Interstate 77 coming here and seen there where the bridge crosses New River that there is the Shot Tower.

Now, that is not in Carroll County, that's a quarter mile out of Carroll County.

But at that time, the lead mines were a big deal for producing lead.

But then that, as well as other products that they found, and like I say, the iron ore, while it was mined at one point in time for low-quality iron, it was quickly outplaced by the big deposits of higher quality that were out West.

-Well, when I came here in '64, Carroll had huge dairy operations, and numerous dairy operations in Carroll County.

I mean, I don't have any idea how many, but dairy farming was big in Carroll County, and I'm talking large herds, large milking operations.

That was a big thing.

There was a period of time, and I'm not sure if it was in the '60s or '70s, we became the cabbage capital of Virginia.

We produced more cabbage than any county in Carroll County, in the state of Virginia.

Geographically, we're divided by the Blue Ridge Parkway, so there's a section of Carroll County that's what we call 'below the mountain' .

The area down there on the south-facing side of the mountain is orchards.

It's filled with orchards.

So Carroll was also a large producer of apples at that time too.

I can remember when I'd drive back and forth going to my home in Patrick County, the mountains would be gorgeous in the springtime with all the apple blossoms.

So we were-- farming was huge here.

I mean, it was the way that most people made their living.

Music has always been a big part of Carroll County history.

- [Bill Webb] Yeah, yeah.

[Shelby Puckett] We have a music center down on the parkway, and that's a huge attraction for people.

Carroll County is, in one word, home.

It's my place.

It's my happy place.

It's the place that I expect that I will be living in when I pass away.

It's the place where I've spent my best years, my worst years too.

But I love Carroll County.

Had an opportunity-- like Bill I could have left many times, but never thought about it.

Never, ever considered leaving Carroll County because to me, whatever I need in my life, I have found in Carroll County.

I think that that's what we offer now is for people to retire in an area that's peaceful, beautiful, that nice life of sitting on your porch and watching the sun come up every morning and spending your old age, it gets very appealing to a lot of people.

And I think we have a lot of those people coming.

[♪♪♪] [music fades out] Nestled in the heart of Appalachia.

The University of Virginia's College at Wise is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.