Downtown Waynesville & Hazelwood

Waynesville was laid out in 1810 by Colonel Robert Love, incorporated in 1871, and counted 10,140 residents in 2020. Main Street sits at about 2,700 feet; its 35 contributing buildings, mostly Classical Revival and early commercial, were listed on the National Register in 2005. Below it, Frog Level grew up around the railroad after 1884 on the low ground by Richland Creek and was listed in 2003; its brick commercial buildings now hold a brewery, a coffeehouse, a pottery shop and antique dealers. Street dances and Art After Dark fill the summer calendar.

Hazelwood, now a Waynesville neighborhood, was its own town from 1905 until it merged into Waynesville in July 1995. It began as an industrial suburb around W. H. Cole's 1893 sawmill and later made furniture, leather and rubber goods. Hazelwood Avenue is now a small shopping street with a soap maker, an Italian restaurant and a Plott Hound statue, and a block over on Virginia Avenue the former Hazelwood Elementary School has been the home base of the Folkmoot international folk festival since 2002. The in-town neighborhoods between these districts offer older homes on walkable streets, a short drive to Laurel Ridge and Lake Junaluska, and the Parkway at Balsam Gap.