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Flat Top Manor

Appalachian culture in North CarolinaColonial Revival architecture in North CarolinaCone familyHistoric house museums in North CarolinaHouses completed in 1901
Houses in Watauga County, North CarolinaLandmarks in North CarolinaMuseums in Watauga County, North CarolinaSculpture gardens, trails and parks in the United States
Moses Cone Manor 2007
Moses Cone Manor 2007

Flat Top Manor, as it is most commonly known, is also called the Moses Cone Manor, Moses Cone Estate, and the Moses H. Cone Mansion. It is at Milepost 294 of the Blue Ridge Parkway in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. It was built by American textile entrepreneur Moses H. Cone for his home and based on the idea of replicating George Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate, the largest privately owned house in the United States. He used his estate to showcase his knowledge of scientific farming and to represent his wealth he had accumulated. The manor mansion and associated property was donated to the National Park Service and they managed it. The house is referred to as the Parkway Craft Center to those that travel the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Craft Center has a gift shop and a workshop where various arts and crafts are demonstrated. There are tours given by Park Rangers of the second story of the mansion and there are self-guiding trails on the property where a visitor can hike.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Flat Top Manor (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 36.1491 ° E -81.6929 °
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Address

Moses Cone Manor (Flat Top Manor)

Blue Ridge Parkway 294
28605
North Carolina, United States
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Phone number
National Park Service

call+18282953782

linkWikiData (Q5457813)
linkOpenStreetMap (227992813)

Moses Cone Manor 2007
Moses Cone Manor 2007
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Nearby Places

Moses H. Cone Memorial Park
Moses H. Cone Memorial Park

The Moses H. Cone Memorial Park is a country estate in honor of Moses H. Cone in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. It is on the Blue Ridge Parkway between mileposts 292 and 295 with access at milepost 294. Most locals call it Cone Park. The park is run by the National Park Service and is open to the public. It contains 3,500 acres (14 km2), a 16-acre (65,000 m2) trout lake, a 22-acre (89,000 m2) Bass Lake and 25 miles (40 km) of carriage trails for hiking and horses. The main feature of the park is a twenty-three room 13,000-square-foot (1,200 m2) mansion called Flat Top Manor built around the early 1900s. At the manor, there is a craft shop and demonstration center, along with an information desk and book store. The activities in the park are walking, hiking, cross-country skiing, and horseback riding. More people use the park for hiking and horseback riding than any other activity. There is also fishing available at the two nearby fishing lakes. Many people also do amateur and professional photography, especially in the autumn. The park is open year-round and sees 225,000 people each year being the most visited recreational place on the Blue Ridge Parkway and second in visitors after the Folk Art Center that sees 250,000 visitors. Together with the Julian Price Memorial Park, it is the largest developed area set aside for public recreation on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Moses obtained advice from noted conservationist Gifford Pinchot, the pioneering forester at the Biltmore Estate and First Chief of the US Forest Service, on planting white pine forests and hemlock hedges.It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013 as Flat Top Estate, a national historic district. The district encompasses four contributing buildings and two contributing sites. They include the historic landscape, Flat Top Manor house (1899-1900), carriage house (c. 1899–1905), Cone Cemetery (1908), Sandy Flat Missionary Baptist Church (1908), and the apple barn.

Green Park Inn
Green Park Inn

The Green Park Inn is a historic hotel located on the Eastern Continental Divide in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. The hotel was built in the 1880s and operated continuously until May 24, 2009, reopening after change of ownership and renovation on October 29, 2010.The Green Park Inn is a member of Historic Hotels of America, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation for recognizing and celebrating the finest historic hotels across America.Past guests of the hotel have included John D. Rockefeller, Herbert Hoover, Annie Oakley, Calvin Coolidge, Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Mitchell among others. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 3, 1982. It is located in the Green Park Historic District.In the latter part of the Civil War a small fortification was built on the site of the Green Park by Federal Troops. The hotel is purported to be haunted, and has played host over the years to several conventions of ghost hunters. In the face of a difficult economy, the Green Park Inn was closed seeking a new buyer in 2009, and foreclosed later that year. On March 31, 2010, The Green Park Inn was purchased by two New York real estate investors who were already the owners of a number of other hotel properties. The new owners worked extensively with the Blowing Rock Historical Society and the State Historic Preservation authority in order to the retain charm, character, and historical integrity of the property. Just off the Lobby is the History Room which recounts the Hotel's storied past and contains the original Green Park U.S. Post Office. Following an aggressive renovation of the property, The Green Park Inn reopened to the public on October 29, 2010. During the refurnishing, the owners purchased only American made products. On July 1, 2011, the Green Park Inn reopened the Laurel Room Restaurant (now named the Chestnut Grille, to hone the American Chestnut from which the hotel is primarily constructed) and the Divide Tavern (so named as it straddles the Eastern Continental Divide) following a gut renovation of the hotel's kitchen facilities. The new food and beverage operations was headed by James Beard award-winning Chef James Welch.On October 29, 2011, the Green Park Inn celebrated its first anniversary of reopening after having a progressively successful year. In 2016, the hotel celebrated its 125th anniversary at a gala dinner and dance celebrating a milestone for the state's second oldest operating resort hotel and the last of the "Grand Manor" hotels still operating in western North Carolina. Included among the guests were descendants of two of the three hotels founders, the Bernhardt family and the Harper family.