Todd Historic District

Todd is a small mountain village in the Blue Ridge, set in a narrow valley along Elk Creek on the line between Ashe and Watauga Counties. The historic district preserves most of the community's core: wood-frame stores sheathed in galvanized pressed tin, houses showing bungalow and Victorian details, a church, a hotel, barns and outbuildings. Most of these date from 1910 to 1920, when the Virginia-Carolina Railroad, known as the Virginia Creeper, reached Todd and set off a timber boom. Lumber, tan bark, pulpwood and extract wood moved through the valley floor's lumberyards and rail yards, and merchants, a bank and a post office followed. Notable resources include the Elkland Depot, an 1888 building brought by train from Virginia, and the Todd Hotel, a circa 1840 Greek Revival house enlarged around 1912 with Victorian ornament. Together they show how a late-arriving railroad shaped a rural mountain town between the 1840s and the early 1950s.