Hendersonville, North Carolina, may be an up-and-coming trails community, but its recreation roots run deep. The southern Blue Ridge Mountains community created summer camp culture as we know it in the 19th century when vacationers came up from the sweltering South Carolina heat to take in the cool mountain air.
Today, Hendersonville is an active community of lunch-hour laps and after-work group rides at the numerous local trail systems. A sign of Hendersonville’s biking bona fides: this is where residents of the legendary outdoors communities of Ashevilleand Brevard—with destination-worthy recreation opportunities in their own backyards—come to play on weekends.
Now, Hendersonville boasts the Blue Ridge region’s newest bike path, which will ultimately connect that city to Brevard and allow for easy, scenic and car-free excursions between both communities.
The History of the Ecusta Trail
The roots of the new Ecusta Trail run deep, too.
In 1939, the Ecusta Corp. opened a paper mill in Brevard, on the rail line along the Davidson River. Named after what’s thought to be a Cherokee word meaning either “place of origin” or “rippling waters”, a reference to the river that paralleled the rail line, The Ecusta Mill employed 3,500 workers at its peak, but when it shuttered in 2002, the rail line lay abandoned…