Cherokee County, North Carolina

Cherokee County sits at the far western tip of North Carolina, bordered by Tennessee and Georgia, with Murphy as its courthouse town and Andrews along the Valley River to the northeast. A large share of the county is Nantahala National Forest, and the Hiwassee River enters from Clay County, passes through Murphy and widens into Hiwassee Lake behind Hiwassee Dam, with the quieter Apalachia Lake just downstream. Jennifer takes on properties here by request, when a home or land is genuinely exceptional: a lakefront on Hiwassee, a large private tract backing up to national forest in the Snowbird or Unicoi mountains, or a farm in the Valley River bottomland.

The county's craft heritage runs deep. The John C. Campbell Folk School at Brasstown, the oldest and largest folk school in the country, straddles the Cherokee-Clay line on the county's southeastern edge, and Marble's quarries supplied the blue marble for the 1926 county courthouse that still anchors downtown Murphy.