Downtown Spruce Pine Historic District

Spruce Pine's downtown, set on steep hillsides above the North Toe River, is a compact commercial core of three blocks along Oak Avenue and Locust Street. Its roughly thirty-three contributing buildings are mostly one to three stories, built of brick or local stone between 1909 and 1953. The Spruce Pine Depot of 1909 is a stuccoed, half-timbered Tudor Revival building with flared eaves. The Gunter Building, of about 1941, is built of river-tumbled micaceous biotite stone. The town's growth followed the arrival of the Clinchfield Railroad in 1903 and the mining of feldspar, kaolin and mica, with a second building surge in the 1940s during World War II. Local mica industrialist C. S. Gunter funded several downtown structures, and a 1930 town ordinance required non-combustible construction within the fire limits. The district is valued for its rhythm of attached storefronts and its surviving commercial character from the first half of the twentieth century.