Mount Airy, North Carolina

We arrived at site 59 in the Mayberry Campground in Mt Airy, NC, and settled in to enjoy a bit of television nostalgia as well as beautiful Blue Ridge mountain scenery.

This is the view from our front door. The park is terraced into a rolling hillside, with sometimes confusing, but very nice, spacing.

Mt Airy is the boyhood home of Andy Griffith of television fame. He grew up in this (at the time) small town, and several of the downtown locations appeared in “Mayberry”. Floyd’s barber shop and the next door Snappy Lunch appeared in numerous episodes and were mentioned in many more.

Andy’s boyhood home is now a private residence.

Downtown has been decorated with numerous murals, very well done. This one is easy to identify!

This mural was a surprise. We had no idea that Donna Fargo was a Mayberry girl.

This is a refurbished sign exactly like the original.

Near the Mt Airy downtown area, the Andy Griffith Museum showcases memorabilia from Andy’s life. We were surprised to learn that Andy Griffith was an accomplished singer, with several well received albums, including a platinum album.

Andy Griffith also had a very successful stage presence, playing lead roles in No Time For Sergeants. The film A Face in the Crowd was his introduction as a dramatic actor.

Other Mayberry cast members are included in the displays including, of course, Don Knotts as Barney Fife.

Mt Airy is also home to the largest open pit granite quarry in the world! 

Seen from space, “The Rock” is seven miles long, a mile wide, and 8,000 feet deep!

A disgruntled farmer could not figure out why he couldn’t grow anything on the land he had just bought and practically gave the land to a pair of railroad entrepreneurs who immediately saw a market for the flawless, even colored stone. 107 years later, the sound of drilling, sawing, and polishing still echoes across the eastern side of Mt Airy.

Tours were once offered, but federal and insurance regulations have put an end to them. The near 100 year old office building has a small display explaining the operation and has photographs of many projects that used this granite.

It’s said that a slab of granite quarried from here today will exactly match one quarried a hundred years ago as well as one quarried 100 years in the future. There is an estimated 500 years of stone remaining here! North Carolina stone has been used on projects around the world, including the World War II memorial in Washington DC.

As a small side note, the roads in Mayberry Campground are paved with crushed leftover granite from the quarry.

Mt Airy is just a short distance from the Blue Ridge Parkway, so after an awesome sunset, we made plans  to take a short daytrip to visit a section we had not seen in the past. 

The Blue Ridge Music center, on the Parkway, is an incredible narrative of the history of Blue Grass music, as well as a collection of priceless instruments, written music, and more recently, videos of Blue Grass pioneers.

This early America banjo is clearly of West African design, but incorporates modifications, including flat fingerboards and tuning pegs.

This 18th century violin, on the left, was of a design widely imitated in America.

This Appalachian dulcimer, in a unique coffin style, was built by Howard Duff in 1940.

A separate building houses a display of moonshine stills, along with a number of photographs depicting some of the thousands of stills operated (and perhaps, operating) in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Every day during the summer season a group plays Blue Grass music from noon to four at the Music Center. The groups rotate, and we were fortunate to see Scott Freeman and Willard Gayheart.

We stayed for a two hour set, clapping and humming as the duo played a variety of old tunes, as well as Willard’s original work, while Scott played the mandolin, violin, and banjo. Great times!

We had to keep moving, so after a rousing version of “Roly Poly, daddy’s Little Fatty”, we headed into Galax, Virginia, the site of the Old Fiddlers Convention. The worlds oldest and largest Bluegrass festival is an annual event, with more than $20,000 in prizes to be awarded this year. Sadly we will miss the festival, so we contented ourselves with lunch at the Fiddle Head Diner. We were the only patrons so we got to have a great conversation with the server, and learned that she was absolutely not looking forward to the fiddling festivities!

Back home, another wonderful cloud formation at sunset called an end to a great day.

Rest in Peace, Norma.