Location: SR 2053 at Pilot Mountain State Park
County: Surry
Original Date Cast: 1951
Pilot Mountain is one of North Carolina’s most recognizable landmarks. Rising 2,420 feet above the surrounding countryside, it can be seen for hundreds of square miles and has served as a guidepost for travelers for centuries. The unusual mountain is a survivor of the Sauratown Mountain range. After millions of years of erosion, little is left of the ancient range.
Pilot Mountain is an inselberg or monadnock; an isolated hill or mountain rising from a relatively flat plain. The base of the mountain is conical with slopes that gradually culminate into two distinct pinnacles known as “Big Pinnacle,” a quartzite monadnock with a rounded vegetation covered top, and “Little Pinnacle,” which is a lower section of rare metamorphic rock. Another interesting feature located on the mountain is “The Devil’s Den,” a small grotto from which a steady breeze always blows. Members of over seventy families of plants live on or around the mountain and among the diverse animal life are rare nesting ravens.
The mountain’s unique shape served as an easily identifiable landmark for people traveling across the Piedmont region. What began as a trail network forged thousands of years ago by American Indians, the Great Wagon Road became the primary route Europeans followed when settling western North Carolina by 1750. On November 7, 1753, the Moravian Brethren travelling to present-day Winston-Salem remarked, “We came at once to a very steep little hill, and then there was a long ascent. From the top we saw the Pilot Mountain in North Carolina and rejoiced to think that we would soon see the boundary of Carolina and set foot in our own dear land.”
The mountain was identified on maps as early as 1755 as “Pilot Mountain”, “Mount Ararat”, and less commonly, “The Stonehead.” Settlement near the mountain began before 1755, but was initially slow due to a gang of highwaymen who had built a fort just north of the mountain. The French and Indian War also contributed to the slow settlement that effected the entirety of western North Carolina. Even so, the Moravians and others sourced whetstones for sharpening tools and mill stones for grinding grain from the streams close to Pilot Mountain. An unfinished, broken millstone can be seen while hiking the Corridor Trail from the mountain to the Yadkin River.
Pilot Mountain was privately owned from 1857 to 1968, serving as a commercial tourist attraction for much of that period. Largely due to the efforts of local citizens interested in protecting the mountain and its natural beauty, Pilot Mountain became the fourteenth North Carolina State Park in 1968. Pilot Mountain State Park now features 3,703 acres for camping, nature study, hiking and horseback riding. It was registered in 1976 as a National Natural Landmark.
References:
Adelaide L. Fries, ed., Records of the Moravians in North Carolina, I (1922)
Adelaide L. Fries, ed., Records of the Moravians in North Carolina, II (1968 reprint)
Bill Sharpe, A New Geography of North Carolina (1954-1965)
Gilles Robert de Vaugondy, Partie de l’Amerique septentreionale qui conprend le cours d l’Ohio, la Nille Angleterr, la Nille York, le New Jersey, la Pensylvanie, le Maryland, la Vergniie, la Carolina… (1755)
Joshua Frye and Peter Jefferson, A map of the most inhabited part of Virginia containing the whole province of Maryland with parts of Pensilvania, New Jersey, and North Carolina. (1775)
J. Wright Horton Jr. and Victor A Zullo, eds., The Geology of the Carolina (1991)
Pilot Mountain State Park website: http://www.ncparks.gov
William S. Powell, North Carolina Through Four Centuries (1989)
William S. Powell, ed., Encyclopedia of North Carolina—entry by Ken Otterbourg