Carson House

1793 plantation house, now a McDowell County history museum

A two-storey log house built in 1793 by John Carson, one of the first white settlers in this part of the North Carolina mountains. The original logs are visible from inside the additions tacked on over the next century. Now run as a museum of McDowell County history, with rooms furnished to different periods and a small barn outside displaying farm implements.

Open weekends and by appointment. About five miles west of central Marion on the old Pleasant Gardens road.

things to do museum
A story
John Carson built this two-storey log house in 1793 on the old wagon road west, before North Carolina had been settled this far back. The Buncombe Turnpike — the main route for driving Tennessee livestock to Charleston markets — was rerouted past the door in the 1820s. Two of the Carson sons died in a famous 1827 duel over local politics; the courthouse trial of the survivor was the most attended event in the county's first century.