[piano intro] - [Deborah] Next on "North Carolina Weekend", join us from Hendersonville as we explore mountain escapes, apples, artists, restaurants, inns, and a whole lot more.

All from Henderson County, coming up next.

- [Narrator] Funding for "North Carolina Weekend" is provided in part by VisitNC, 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.

[upbeat music] ♪ - Welcome to "North Carolina Weekend" everyone.

I'm Deborah Holt Noel.

And this week we are in Hendersonville, a wonderful destination to visit year round.

With lots of places to explore, great food and wine, and relaxing overnight stays.

Now we've got a lot to show you.

So let's get started, our first stop, an apple orchard.

This valley that's so beautiful and surrounded by the Blue Ridge mountains is the largest producer of apples in the state.

And you-pick-them orchards like the one here at Stepp's Hillcrest, brings in thousands of visitors every fall to sample all things apple.

- In Henderson County, apples have been king here for a long time.

We pride ourselves on growing a good fruit.

We try to do that.

And folks come out here to our place that's a beautiful scenery and they love, they get to walk around anywhere they want to.

So they enjoy picking their own apples.

And now we've added some other things to go with that.

- They're curving!

- [Deborah] One highlight of a visit to Stepp's is firing off the apple cannon.

- The apple cannons have been a real boom for us here at the farm, people really enjoy that.

We make our own donuts.

We have fried pies that we cook.

We do slushies.

We have jar goods.

We have farm t-shirts.

We have a corn maze.

We do school tours.

We do wagon rides on the weekend.

So we've got a lot of things that folks can do here.

I think we've got something that most everybody would enjoy.

- Those apples had to go somewhere.

In fact, the little community of Hendersonville really took off when trains bringing visitors from Charleston established a depot here.

Then farmers used the trains to send their crops all over the country.

A few years later, when the depot fell into disrepair, they offered it to the Apple Valley Model Railroad Club.

- Of course, the club jumped on it.

And the deal was that we could be in here for free, as long as we were open every Saturday to the public.

And very soon, we were packing the place on Saturdays.

So the club went to the city and said, "could we have the rest of the building?"

Well our model railroad is basically from the Northern side of Charlotte, it's called the Lynnwood Yard, still in existence today, over here to Asheville and Hendersonville area.

And then we have a section that covers north of Asheville up through Hickory and Black Mountain, Marion, and those towns.

The public's very complimentary.

I mean, they come in here in tell us this is one of the best model railroad clubs they've seen anywhere in the country.

And I seriously believe that we're in the top 10%.

It is a wonderful group of guys and we really do enjoy each other and enjoy the hobby together.

- [Deborah] On the Southwest side of Henderson County, another family-owned orchard gives visitors a slightly different experience, including hard ciders.

- Here at Jeter Mountain Farm, we like to offer something for every member of the family.

So there's a play area for children.

There's a hard cider tap room for parents.

And of course you have our you-pick fruits.

So we're of course a you-pick apple orchard primarily, but we also have you-pick peaches, you-pick berries, you-pick flowers, and everything in between.

We also have a large market area, and this year, which is new, we have our coffee house.

- The hard cider starts here in the orchard.

So we grow the apples and then we press them here on site and they ferment them here.

And then it turns into the hard ciders.

We have our original hard cider flavor, which is like a secret blend of our apples.

We introduced the Pink Lady hard cider last year in our can.

And then this year we've also introduced the Granny Hard cider.

- [Deborah] On our visit, we fell in love with the flowers.

- We have a two acre flower field.

We have xenias and we have sunflowers.

And so guests can ride a wagon out to our flower field and they can cut their own flowers.

While they're out there, you'll probably see some honey bees.

Those are our friends.

Honey bees are the hardest workers here on the farm.

They are our pollinators for our flowers and for our fruits and they don't hurt you, so they're our friends.

We say be nice to the bees.

If you're nice to them, they'll be nice to you too.

- We want more of our customer to walk away with an experience instead of just with a product.

And so that's something that we've really prided ourselves in doing and worked really hard to do.

- Also right downtown Hendersonville is a place where you can play all the pinball you want.

Classic games, zero quarters, one price, at the Appalachian Pinball Museum.

[upbeat music] - So basically the way it works in here is pretty simple.

We've got around about 85 games that are playable, most are pinball machines, but we do have a section of old video games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and that kind of stuff.

It's free to come in and look around.

And then if people do decide they wanna stick around and play, we've got pretty much all of the games set into their free play mode.

So you don't really need quarters or tokens.

We just do a flat fee of $12 per person for whoever's gonna be playing.

And that lets you just play all you want for the entire day.

Williams Line Drive here, it's from 1962, it's the oldest playable game we have in here right now.

We've got some games on display going all the way back to the 40s.

But as far as what people can play, this is the oldest one we have.

And even though that's the oldest one, it's probably the game that sees more action than most of them in here.

A lot of people love that game.

- [Deborah] Perhaps you'd rather do the bouncing instead of a pinball, than head to the Riveter in Mills River.

- So a rivet is something that holds different pieces together to build optimal strength.

So we look at that as the different aspects of our facility.

So we have the bike park, the climbing gym, the bar, yoga, all these different pieces, but they're really held together by the strength of the community.

So we get a lot of first time people, travelers who are just coming to see what we're all about.

And we have something here for everybody, whether you're a seasoned pro or somebody who's never even gotten on a bike or has never climbed before, or it's your first yoga class, or you wanna try a locally crafted brew, we have something for everybody to introduce you to what we're all about.

So this is our bike park.

This is the canopy-covered riding area.

We also have an outdoor riding area right behind us.

So this is a place where people can ride rain or shine, day or night.

We have a little pump track so any new riders can come out here and it functions a bit like a bunny slope at a ski lodge.

And then once you're progressing, you can pop into the main bike park.

And there are four progressive lines.

So everything from a green line, so beginner friendly, to black line for more expert riders.

So our climbing gym is 16,000 square feet, the walls range, but they get up to 50 feet, which is quite high, some of the highest walls on the east coast actually if you wanna experience that.

We have top rope and lead climbing and auto belays.

So say you come on your own without a partner, you can boulder, just climbing with your body, or you can hop in an auto belay and you can clip in.

We'll show you how to do that and give a tutorial.

But you can clip into your harness and climb solo up the 50 foot walls.

It's something really special and magical that somehow we just manifested in this place.

It's great community engagement and support and love that you really do feel.

And I think it makes us different than other adventure facilities that you might find.

- The food scene here in Henderson County is really taking off.

I found everything from soul food to a campfire grill to this popular restaurant called shine right here on Main Street.

There's truly something for everyone in Henderson County.

[upbeat music] - Maybe 17 years ago, my mom and my uncle opened the restaurant.

They had a different name for it.

My grandfather passed away.

His nickname was Daddy D so that's where the name came from.

Suber is our family name so it's just a little play on words.

Daddy D's Suber Soul Food.

Traditionally we'll have chicken, we'll have pork chops, we'll have fish, we'll have macaroni and cheese, we'll have collards, cabbage, black eyes, Pinto beans, all of the traditional country cooking.

When the pandemic hit, we had people who had never been in our restaurant before, said they wanted to support us because we're a local business.

So they started ordering once a week.

And that just has a attribute to how the people are here.

- The Hendersonville region is famous for its summer camps.

Since the 1920s, kids have come to these mountains for an unforgettable summer camp experience.

So why not create a restaurant that honors that tradition?

Come with me to the Campfire Grill.

[bright music] ♪ - It's a substantial community business lifestyle.

We are here because of the great things that camping do for all of us.

- The way that we work together and celebrate where we are, which we do when we eat, and we gather is the same principles that we learned at camp and we love about that.

- But we went to all the camps to try to create a history and a legacy of the summer camp world here, which goes back to the 20s.

Got some of their great iconic photos, historical photos, and celebrated them through our art and our decorations.

- So Camplify, which is our nonprofit partner, what they do is create camp partnerships with the camps in the area and raise money to send kids who grow up here who wouldn't normally have the financial ability to go to these summer camps to go to these summer camps.

- So we put anywhere from 150 to 180 children in partnerships with all of the area camps.

- When I say labor of love, like there's a lot of labor that goes into Campfire Grill, starting with our Santa Maria grill.

So we are not only cooking and doing the regular day to day restaurant world of feeding and cleaning and taking care of people, but we're also splitting wood so that we can cook over live wood.

Our most iconic dish would be our Counselor Burger, which is our house ground beef grilled over those wood coals with a bacon jam, arugula, fried onions, pickled onions, and gouda cheese melted on it.

I could never forget the s'mores skillet, which is also amazing because a dollar from every skillet that is sold supports Camplify.

And that is graham cracker crumbs, dark chocolate with marshmallows.

We toast it in its own little cast-iron dish, a little bit of a chocolate drizzle on top, and then it's served with graham crackers.

And it is I think a sticky, gooey, delicious dessert.

- The grapes on this vine are just about ready to be picked and transformed into wine.

In fact, the land around here is so special to wine making, it has its own AVA.

So I stopped by a brand new winery not far from here to learn more.

[gentle music] - Souther Williams Vineyard originated with a land grant in 1800.

So it's been in my family for 222 years.

It's been a pleasure to keep it in the family all these years.

Souther Williams is part of an AVA known as Crest of the Blue Ridge.

An AVA is a federally designated wine growing region.

So there are seven wineries currently that make up crest of the Blue Ridge.

And we were number seven when it came online this past April.

when Souther Williams was first born as an idea, one of the things that I really wanted to focus on was European, German, and Russian varietals.

It was a little bit of, I didn't want to be me too.

So part of what Souther Williams and I think all of the wineries in Henderson County are about is educating the consumer on wines that perhaps they've not had the opportunity to enjoy.

And so we take great pride in bringing some wines here that many consumers say they've never seen or heard of and they walk away with a whole new appreciation of a particular wine.

I think our primary intent in the creation of Souther Williams tasting room in particular was to take advantage of the open air environment to take advantage of being here in the vineyard.

In fact, our tagline is "where the mountains meet the vines".

- So somebody came in one day and said, "what are you guys doing?

You just trying to shine up this old building?"

And I said "yeah, we're gonna shine this place up a little bit.

And it just kind of stuck.

When we grew up in this town, much of Main Street I remember was pretty slow.

There were boarded up buildings here.

They came in and revamped downtown and it started to stir a lot of interest in the storefronts and stores started moving in and businesses came in and so did the people.

- [Layla] Something for everyone.

We wanted the door to open and close and have people that come all the time and not wait for a special occasion.

You can do that, but you can also just come in shorts and a t-shirt and have a great burger.

- So we have things from many different cuisines and we try to prepare them as authentically as we possibly can.

And we receive a lot of positive comments that, "hey, I used to eat this in my hometown halfway around the world and it tastes exactly the same way" and that's what we were shooting for.

And the culinary power that's in the kitchen behind me is unbelievable.

We have about 27 people who work in our kitchen, 74 people I think on board all the time, front of house and back house included.

So it allows us to have a lot of individual people can work on different components of different dishes.

And sometimes we pull them all together in just the right way.

- One of the many cool things about Henderson County is its vibrant art scene.

In fact, the Blue Ridge Crafts Trails are a great way to find some of the many artisans in this area, including Melinda Lawton and her Sweet Magnolia Gallery.

Melinda had a successful career in Hollywood, creating graphics and titles for movies and TV shows.

But her career really took off when she started creating her own jewelry part-time.

- And then Carrie Underwood wore my earrings the night she won "American Idol" and it just sort of took off from there.

The reason why I started making jewelry is that I all my life have collected antique and vintage jewelry.

So that was always what I was drawn towards.

And when I started making jewelry, it all looked that way.

It was all coming out, very vintage inspired, very Victorian, very Edwardian.

And so I just ran with that, that really was my style.

So yeah, and then I became sort of known for that, and it's been really great with the Downton Abbey and all the other things that everyone now loves vintage.

So it's really been really great for my business.

For me, being in a part of the Blue Ridge Craft Trails has been really wonderful.

People are able to find me that maybe would never have found me and other artists as well all over.

There's just so many wonderful artists around here.

- Of course the Hendersonville area has just dozens of great places to stay, from historic inns to bed and breakfast to camp sites.

Tonight, I'm staying at the Echo Mountain Inn, which opened in the 1930s, but is now under new ownership with a wonderful story.

[gentle music] - So I was just looking online and I found this place I wanted to come stay at to visit my son in North Carolina who was going to college.

And so I just heard they had bad and breakfast here, never been to North Carolina.

And I pulled it up and it said this inn was a bed and breakfast and it was for sale.

And I mentioned it to him and he's like, oh, that's really interesting.

Send me the information.

And so one thing led to another and he called the owners and the realtor and we just kept on going and God opened up the doors and we just kept on going through them.

- Never done anything related to hospitality or innkeeping.

So it was a very big change for us.

So ultimately over the course of about a year and a half, we purchased the inn, along with my folks.

I have been running it for the last three years with them.

And now we have four generations that live on site here.

We've got grandma who's a matriarch who lives right here, and then my folks, and then we've got five kids, four of whom still live with us.

- [Deborah] More challenges ensued.

They opened the end right before COVID, but managed to stay afloat.

Then came Christmas 2020.

- Our daughter was up late at two in the morning, smelled smoke and called us and said seems like the wellness center was on fire.

We called the fire department.

They came up right away.

If they wouldn't have come, we would've lost all our buildings, but the wellness center was destroyed.

That was a two-story building where Becky was running her wellness business on the main floor.

And then our family was basically living upstairs.

We didn't sleep in that building.

Nobody was hurt fortunately, but it it's still a hard loss today.

We lost everything that was personal to us.

- The Bonnema's faith kept being open and now they proudly showcase over 30 rooms.

This is the Magnolia Room where I'll be staying tonight.

Isn't it warm and inviting?

Perfect for my stay here in Hendersonville.

- So we have about 30 rooms in our inn, so it's a little bit larger than most bed and breakfasts.

And so our bed and breakfast experience is a little bit different, but we have a hot breakfast every morning and people are just pleasantly surprised that they can have something in the morning that's nice and warm and tasty before they go out to their hiking or their exploring.

- This is Jump Off Rock, just a few miles up the road from the Echo Mountain Inn and a favorite place to catch a sunset and look back over my wonderful weekend in Henderson County.

[gentle music] The Hendersonville Welcome Center is at 201 South Main Street in Hendersonville, and it's open daily.

For more information, give the welcome center a call at [828] 693-9708.

And for even more things to do, go to visithendersonvillenc.org.

Aren't these mountains beautiful?

From this vantage point, you can see four states, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and of course, North Carolina.

And if you wanna know more about the history of these mountains, head to Old Fort to a museum appropriately named The Mountain Gateway.

[gentle music] - [Randy] Come over here and crank this and you can make some chicken feed.

- Mountain Gateway Museum basically started back in the 1960s as a kind of a local history museum.

And then in the 1970s, the state bought it and has been part of the state's Department of Natural Cultural Resources ever since.

- [Narrator] You'll find the Mountain Gateway Museum less than half a mile off I-40 in Old Fort.

It's a four acre site along Mill Creek that helps tell the tales of mountain days gone by.

- Their mission is to carry on a lot of the ways that are being forgotten.

- We have just started homeschooling and we're starting to look for just more local opportunities to learn about local history, local culture, local heritage.

- They need to see the pictures.

They need to see the spinning wheels and the plows and all those kinds of things.

- Same way with the water.

Nowadays, the children go open a pump or open a faucet to get water.

And with this they're fascinated with, especially the little bitty ones, they will pump and then run around, put their hand in it and it quits.

And they can't quite comprehend that they're powering it and if they quit, it quits.

- We're big into education, of course, but really what we try to do here is to preserve, protect, promote, and pass on to future generations the history and the culture of Western North Carolina.

- [Narrator] They do that by offering various festivals throughout the year, like Pioneer Days with costumed exhibitors and fun activities, music, and food.

The rest of the time, it relies on exhibits like those found in the stone building.

- Some of the permanent exhibits that we have are about wallflowers of Western North Carolina.

And of course, those are flowers that can be used as medicines, as well as foods.

We have the exhibit here about a log cabin and what it was like to live in a long cabin.

You really didn't have all the different rooms with their single purpose that we're used to today.

- [Narrator] Other exhibits upstairs include a history of the moonshine industry and that of native animals.

From there, more exhibits can be found downstairs.

- We have a new traveling exhibit that's about African American music.

It has a sound interactive with that.

So you can actually play and hear the songs and the music as well as see the pictures and everything that goes with that traveling exhibit.

- [Narrator] They've also moved two historic log cabins to the property that house events and exhibits.

- The Morgan Cabin, the one closer to the museum, is what we call our fiber arts cabin.

It does have a loom in there.

So we mainly talk about the kind of materials that people use to make their clothing and what the processing was for cotton and wool and flax, which was made into linen.

So we do some demonstrations in there about spinning and weaving.

- [Narrator] And how to dye those fibers using what they could find long before dyes were available.

- Today, we're dying with maple bark that's been soaking in a bucket of water for a year.

Old literature from the 18th century and back says they got purple from rotten maple bark.

- [Narrator] How our ancestors lived and even thrived generations ago is foreign to most of us today.

But fortunately for visitors here, it's on display for everyone to see.

- If I stop doing what I do and a lot of these people stop doing what they do, then our culture disappears.

- Especially I think the children need to have a lot of chances to use their hands and the grownups too.

- And we called them chores back in the day.

Nowadays kids will do it all day because they think it's fun.

- I think finding our roots, finding out where we're from, learning to have that connection, learning to know what our community is in order that we can give back to that community and serve it is incredibly important.

And so I'm so glad this is here.

- [Deborah] The Mountain Gateway Museum is at 24 Water Street in Old Fort, and it's open every day except Monday.

For more information, give the museum a call at [828] 668-9259 or visit them online at mgmnnc.org.

Well, that's it for tonight's show.

We've had a wonderful time here in Hendersonville, the perfect place for a mountain escape.

And if you've missed anything in today's show, just remember you can always watch us again online at pbsnnc.org.

Have a great North Carolina weekend everyone, good night.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ - [Narrator] Funding for "North Carolina Weekend" is provided in part by VisitNC, 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]