There are many reasons to plan a trip to Western North Carolina: ancient mountains, waterfalls, charming small towns, and some of the best hiking and fishing in the South. Wildlife can also be added to that list, with white-tailed deer, elk, black bears, foxes, and white squirrels calling this region home. The latter, however, are concentrated in one particular place: Brevard.
Home to fewer than 8,000 residents, Brevard is a unique little town where these white squirrels have resided and grown in number since the 1950s. Back then, as the story goes, a woman named Barbara Mull was introduced to two white squirrels, which had been brought up to North Carolina from Florida by her uncle, Harry. Allegedly, the squirrels had escaped a circus caravan and had been running loose around a pecan orchard in Madison, Florida.
Eventually, the squirrels, which Barbara initially named Snowball and Snowflake, made their way into the wild—and the population began to grow. According to Katy Rosenberg, the director of the White Squirrel Institute, the last official count of Brevard’s white squirrels was conducted in 2012, when roughly 1,000 were recorded. That said, she expects the number to have increased over the years…