There’s No Business Like Snow Business: History of Skiing in the High Country

Image credit: Unidentified woman overlooking a slope. From the collection of Appalachian Ski Mountain.

January 24 - May 31, 2014

While skiing has become a mainstay of the tourist industry of western North Carolina, the sport has actually only been a part of the region’s tourist industry since the start of the 1960s.

Beginning in the early 1800s, western North Carolina began to develop a tourist industry based on the believed curative effects of mountain air and water. People began to travel to the region’s hotels, spas and sanatoriums to seek cures for a variety of ailments and diseases, such as rheumatism and tuberculosis.

In the late 1800s, the focus of the region’s tourist industry started to shift from health to recreation, as people began to come from the crowded, rapidly industrializing cities in other parts of the country to visit the natural, rural beauty of the southern mountains.

Though tourism in western North Carolina affected traditional mountain lifestyles and landscapes, agriculture and land ownership, and sometimes stymied other possible forms of economic development, it also brought valuable seasonal income into the region. North Carolina leaders and agencies began to view mountain tourism as especially important to the state economy during the Great Depression of the 1930s.