Buncombe County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Buncombe County

One hundred and seventy-eight thousand nine hundred and twenty-six square feet of interior floor space inside a single privately-owned residence — that is the Biltmore Estate's main house in Asheville, designed by Richard Morris Hunt for George Washington Vanderbilt II, completed in 1895 in a French Renaissance Revival style modeled on the Château de Blois in France's Loire Valley, and still the largest privately-owned home in the United States by interior square footage 130 years after construction. The estate operates today as a fee-admission tourist destination run by Vanderbilt's descendants through The Biltmore Company, draws roughly 1.7 million visitors per year per the company's own annual reports, and produces wine from 75 acres of estate vineyards on the property's working farm.

Buncombe County's 656 sq mi wrap Asheville (population 94,589, the county seat and the largest city in western North Carolina), the Blue Ridge Parkway's most-photographed milepost 350-390 section (Craggy Gardens, Graveyard Fields, and the Mount Mitchell turnoff all sit inside this 40-mile stretch), and the eastern flank of the Black Mountains — the highest mountain range in the eastern United States with five peaks above 6,400 ft. Mount Mitchell at 6,684 ft (the highest peak in the entire eastern United States, named for Elisha Mitchell, the University of North Carolina geologist who first measured it and who died in 1857 falling from a cliff while attempting to confirm his elevation calculations against later challenges) is accessible by a 5-mile paved state-park access road off the Blue Ridge Parkway at MP 355. Mt. Mitchell State Park campground accepts rigs to 35 ft on 9 first-come no-hookup sites and is the highest elevation campground on the East Coast at 6,300 ft. Asheville Municipal Code §16-220 prohibits overnight RV street parking citywide; commercial RV-friendly bases concentrate along I-26 and I-40 east and west of town. Pisgah National Forest's Appalachian Ranger District permits 14-day dispersed at signed sites with rigs to 30 ft. The River Arts District and the historic Grove Park Inn (1913 stone-and-timber resort hotel where F. Scott Fitzgerald wintered in the 1930s while Zelda was hospitalized at the Highland Hospital nearby) anchor the year-round arts and lodging economy.