Green Park Historic District

Green Park sits on a mountain ridge in Blowing Rock, Watauga County, where a resort community grew up around the Green Park Hotel, built in 1891. The hotel, described as the state's second oldest surviving resort hotel, anchors a district of roughly two dozen summer cottages, most dating from the 1920s, along with the Blowing Rock Country Club golf course and the Mt. Bethel Reformed Church and Cemetery. Many cottages are sheathed in chestnut bark and set on stone foundations, with stone retaining walls, steps, and terraces fitted to the steep slopes. Summer residents included textile and insurance figures from across the state, and the district's social history is tied to the families who built and returned to these houses over generations. The resort is also linked to the Blowing Rock itself, a cliff overlooking the Johns River Gorge. The district is valued for its intact early twentieth-century resort character and for its landscape and craftsmanship typical of western North Carolina summer colonies.