How Brevard earned the score

Let’s meet Brevard, NC

Brevard sits at about 2,200 feet in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, roughly 35 miles southwest of Asheville. It is a small place, 7,744 people at the 2020 census, and the seat of a county of just under 33,000. It is also the front door to a landscape that does a lot of the work. Transylvania County advertises more than 250 waterfalls, and it has leaned into that so fully that the county line is marked with the phrase Land of Waterfalls. This is one of those rare cases where a slogan is closer to an inventory than a boast. Looking Glass Falls, a wide sheet of water dropping about 60 feet, is visible from the road with a short walk down a set of stairs, and it is often described as the most visited waterfall in the state.

The town was surveyed and laid out in 1861, its incorporation delayed by the Civil War until 1868, and it was named for Colonel Ephraim Brevard, a physician and Revolutionary War figure connected to the Mecklenburg Resolves. The county name, Transylvania, was coined at the founding meeting and reads today like a gift to a tourism office, though it long predates the marketing. What matters for a Creative City study is that Brevard did not have to invent a reason for people to come. The mountains, the forest, and the water were already here. The interesting question is how a town of this size turned proximity to scenery into a durable, multi-season identity, and then bolted two very different things onto it.

How Brevard found its thing, twice

The first mascot is the water, and it comes with public land at scale. Brevard is wrapped by Pisgah National Forest to the north and DuPont State Recreational Forest to the southeast, with more than a thousand miles of trails in the surrounding county. Inside Pisgah, Sliding Rock is a natural 60-foot rock waterslide with roughly 11,000 gallons of water pouring over it every minute, and it has been drawing families to slide down a mountain since long before anyone called it an attraction. The Cradle of Forestry, also in Pisgah, marks the birthplace of American forestry education on the old Biltmore estate lands tied to George Vanderbilt, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Gifford Pinchot. This is not a manufactured backdrop. It is a working forest with a real place in the country’s conservation history, and Brevard is its town.

The second mascot is stranger and entirely local. Brevard is home to a population of white squirrels, and the town treats them as civic property. Local history traces them to a single pair that arrived around 1949, after a carnival truck overturned and a Florida man known as Mr. Black caught the escapees and passed them to a Brevard resident, H.H. Mull, whose niece tried to breed them. When she left in the early 1950s the squirrels got loose, found each other, and started a lineage. By 2011 an estimate put the white share of Brevard’s squirrels at about 40 percent. These are not albinos; they carry normal melanin and have dark eyes, a white or grey-streaked coat rather than pink-eyed white. The town took the quirk seriously enough to legislate it. In 1986 the Brevard City Council made the whole city a squirrel sanctuary, making it unlawful to hunt, kill, trap, or otherwise take the protected squirrels within city limits.

How Brevard built it

If the water and the squirrels were found, the cultural anchor was built, deliberately and over decades. The Brevard Music Center began in 1936 as a summer music camp for boys at Davidson College, run by a Davidson faculty member named James Christian Pfohl. Fifty young instrumentalists showed up for that first session. Pfohl led the camp for several years, moved it to its present grounds in Brevard in 1944, and started a festival of concerts in 1945. The name Brevard Music Center was adopted in 1955, and in 1964 Henry Janiec succeeded Pfohl as artistic director. Nearly ninety years on, the center draws around 700 students to campus each summer, with roughly 400 enrolled in its summer institute, aged fourteen and up, studying orchestra, opera, chamber music, and composition. In 2026 it marks its ninetieth-anniversary season, running from late May into late August.

What Brevard did well was refuse to make these three identities compete. A lesser strategy would have picked one, waterfalls or squirrels or music, and buried the others. Instead the town lets a visitor arrive for a drive-behind waterfall, discover a white squirrel on a lightpost outside a shop named for it, and then find out there is a prestigious classical festival happening a few blocks away. The White Squirrel Festival, now usually branded White Squirrel Weekend, has run on Main Street since the mid-2000s, timed to Memorial Day weekend, and by 2026 it had reached its twenty-second year. It fills downtown with more than 80 vendors and over 100 open businesses, is free to attend, and draws crowds reported above 30,000 across the weekend. That is a striking number for a town of fewer than 8,000 residents, and it lands at the front of the summer, right when the music season is opening and the forest is filling up.

The downtown that ties it together

None of the anchors would carry the town on their own without a walkable center to hold them, and Brevard has one. Main Street runs through a compact historic district anchored by the Italianate county courthouse built in the 1870s, and the sidewalks carry the kind of independent gallery, outfitter, brewery, and restaurant mix that turns a scenic drive into an overnight stay. The mountain-biking and paddling crowd that comes for Pisgah and DuPont needs a place to eat, refuel, and sleep, and downtown Brevard is that place. This is the quiet engine under the score. The waterfalls pull people off the interstate corridor, the squirrels and the festival give them a reason to stop in town rather than drive through, and the music center and the shops give them a reason to stay a night or two.

What it created

The results show up in the county’s tourism numbers. Domestic visitors spent about $115 million in Transylvania County in 2019, up 8.1 percent on the year before, and that spending generated roughly $5.26 million in local tax revenue, which the state’s tourism office translated to about $272 in tax savings per county resident. Transylvania has repeatedly landed in the top ten North Carolina counties for annual visitor-spending growth, notable for a rural county with no large city inside it. The forests carry real load: DuPont State Recreational Forest hit 327,000 visitors by late October of 2012, a record at the time, in the same year The Hunger Games premiered with scenes shot at Triple Falls, where Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss crosses the 125-foot cascade. Brevard-based tour operators sold out Hunger Games fan tours that season. Popular culture, in other words, occasionally does Brevard’s marketing for free, and the town is set up to catch the traffic when it does.

The recreation economy runs deeper than sightseeing. Pisgah is widely regarded as one of the premier mountain-biking destinations in the eastern United States, and the trail network around Brevard supports a steady flow of riders, paddlers, climbers, and anglers who come for days rather than hours. That is the kind of visitor who books a cabin, hits a downtown brewery, and comes back the next season, which is exactly the profile that turns a scenic county into a repeat-visit economy. Brevard College and the presence of outfitters, bike shops, and guide services give the town a year-round base of activity that many purely seasonal resort towns lack, and the Music Center adds a cultural payroll and an audience that arrives every summer on a schedule.

The white squirrel, meanwhile, functions as low-cost, high-recall branding that a marketing budget could not buy. It gives the town a logo with legs, a festival, a protected-species story that reporters keep retelling, and a reason for a visitor to slow down and look up. The pairing of a serious natural asset with a genuinely charming quirk is what lifts Brevard above a town that has only scenery. Scenery is common in these mountains. A town where the scenery, the wildlife oddity, and a ninety-year-old classical festival all reinforce one another is not.

Why other towns should follow Brevard’s lead

Brevard ran a play that other small towns can copy without a theme park or a nine-figure budget:

• Name the asset you already have. The county did not build waterfalls; it counted them, branded the line Land of Waterfalls, and made the free roadside falls easy to find.
• Protect the quirk. The 1986 sanctuary ordinance turned a population of odd squirrels into permanent civic identity, then a festival, at almost no cost.
• Keep the serious anchor serious. The music center was not diluted into a tourist show; its rigor is the point, and the prestige rubs off on the whole town.
• Give people a walkable reason to stop. A compact, independent Main Street converts a scenic drive into an overnight, which is where the spending lives.

The takeaway is that a small town does not need one perfect hook. Brevard stacked three imperfect ones, a natural-asset identity, a beloved quirk, and a cultural institution, and let them hold each other up across every season. That layered depth, more than any single attraction, is what earns the score. For a fuller look at how a single well-chosen asset can move a small town, see our flagship study of Thomas Dambo’s trolls in Detroit Lakes, where one artist’s installations reshaped local tourism and the local economy.