Copyright Notice: This article is from the Encyclopedia of North Carolina edited by William S. Powell. Copyright © 2006 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. For personal use and not for further distribution. Please submit permission requests for other use directly to the publisher.
"Land of the Sky" is a slogan applied to the Mountain region of western North Carolina. It was adopted from the title of a novel, "The Land of the Sky"; or, Adventures in Mountain By-Ways (1876), written by Frances Christine Fisher Tiernan (1846-1920), a native of Salisbury, under the pen name Christian Reid. The story describes the activities of summer travelers who enjoy the scenery of North Carolina's mountainous west while engaging in mild flirtations.
Additional Resources:
Passenger Department of the Southern Railway. "The Land of the Sky: A Pictureque Country on the Southern Railway." Southern Railway. 1904. https://archive.org/stream/landofskypicture00sout#page/n7/mode/2up.
Barker, T.M., Jr. A Souvenir Directory to The Land of the Sky. Asheville, N.C. 1898. https://archive.org/stream/souvenirdirector00bark#page/n5/mode/2up.
Presbrey, Frank. The Land of the Sky and Beyond. Southern Railway. 1895. https://archive.org/stream/landofskybeyond00inpres#page/n3/mode/2up.
Smith, Mae Lucile. Sky-Land magazine. Hendersonville, N.C. 1913. https://archive.org/stream/skyland1913smit#page/n5/mode/2up
Image Credits:
Passenger Department of the Southern Railway. Title page of "The Land of the Sky: A Pictureque Country on the Southern Railway." Southern Railway. 1904. https://archive.org/stream/landofskypicture00sout#page/n7/mode/2up.
Williams, Wiley J. "Land of the Sky." NCpedia. Encyclopedia of North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press. Accessed on March 18th, 2025. https://www.ncpedia.org/land-sky.