How Morrow Mountain Became a State Park: Donated Land, the CCC and the 1940 Dedication

About half a million visits are made to Morrow Mountain State Park every year. Many of those visitors drive to the top, look out over Lake Tillery and the Uwharries, and drive back down. Fewer stop to ask how a 936-foot hill in a farming county became a state park in the middle of the Great Depression, when North Carolina had almost no state parks at all.

The answer has three parts. Local people wanted it and organized to get it. Landowners, led by James McKnight Morrow, gave or sold the land on easy terms, and Stanly County borrowed money to buy more. Then two federal relief programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, supplied the labor to build roads, shelters, a pool and a lodge. The park opened to the public on August 17, 1939 and was dedicated on June 29, 1940.

The mountain before the park

Morrow Mountain is what is left of something much larger. The Uwharries began as a chain of volcanoes more than 500 million years ago, and geologists estimate that the range once stood far higher than it does now. What remains is hard, fine-grained volcanic rock, chiefly rhyolite, that resisted erosion while the softer country around it wore down. The summit stands about 400 feet above the surrounding land.

That rock is why people have been coming here for at least 12,000 years. Rhyolite from the top of Morrow Mountain flakes cleanly and holds a sharp edge, and Native toolmakers quarried it on a large scale. Archaeologists identify the summit as one of the largest prehistoric quarries in the Carolina Piedmont, and stone from it supplied the workshops at the Hardaway Site near Badin, about five miles away. The archaeologist Joffre Coe excavated at Lowder’s Ferry, inside today’s park, in 1949. Our page on landscape, archaeology and Indigenous history covers that story.

European settlers arrived along the river in the 1700s. A public ferry was operating below the mountain by the late eighteenth century, carrying the road between Salisbury and Fayetteville, and its site is still called Lowder’s Ferry. In the nineteenth century the best-known resident of the future park was Dr. Francis Kron, the Prussian-born physician whose family farmed at the foot of Fall Mountain until 1910.

A committee and a landowner

After the Kron estate was sold in 1912, the homesite came into the hands of J. M. Morrow of Albemarle. James McKnight Morrow was born in 1864 and died in 1941; the dates are on the bronze plaque that honors him in the park. According to the Stanly News & Press, he and other citizens, among them the newspaper’s publisher, A. C. Huneycutt, began promoting a park on the mountain in the 1920s, and the Depression slowed the effort.

The state’s own history of the park dates the organized campaign to about 1930, when a local committee formed to support the project. Its members included W. B. Beaver, W. E. Smith, T. R. Wolf, D. L. Crowell, J. A. Groves, Heath Kluttz, M. M. Palmer, J. H. Morrow and J. M. Morrow himself. They were asking for something North Carolina barely had. In 1930 the state owned Mount Mitchell and Fort Macon and little else in the way of parks. A separate Branch of State Parks was not created until 1935, the year Thomas W. Morse became the first full-time superintendent.

Stanly County’s timing was good. The same federal relief money that would build Morrow Mountain was reaching the rest of the state in those years. The CCC arrived at Fort Macon in 1933 and 1934, citizens of Winston-Salem and Stokes County donated 3,000 acres for Hanging Rock in 1935, and CCC crews worked on Mount Mitchell from 1936 to 1941. A county that could put land in the state’s hands quickly stood a good chance of getting a camp, and Stanly County had its land ready.

Assembling the land

Two things happened in early 1935. The General Assembly passed Chapter 213 of the Public-Local Laws of 1935, which authorized Stanly County to issue $20,000 in bonds to buy land for a park. And in February, according to the state’s park plan, more than 1,800 acres around Morrow Mountain were donated to the state.

The local newspaper’s account of the same events adds detail and a wrinkle. It says a state parks inspector, L. A. Sharpe, examined about 2,000 acres in 1935; that Morrow conveyed the mountain itself and 1,100 acres to the state for $5,000, with deeds recorded that June; and that gifts from other owners brought the total to about 2,500 acres. The donors it names are E. E. Snuggs, J. A. Groves, Mrs. G. R. McCain, A. F. and E. C. Biles, E. P. and Pantha Clodfelter, Will and Paul Kirk, and the Stanly Lumber Company. Whether Morrow’s transfer is best called a gift or a sale at a nominal price, the plaque’s phrase is fair: his generosity made the park possible.

The park kept growing. By September 9, 1937 the state held more than 3,000 acres. In December 1941 the Carolina Power & Light Company leased its lands along Lake Tillery to the park for 99 years, which brought the total to 4,215 acres, and a 293-acre purchase in 1968 raised it to about 4,500. Later additions, including land that had belonged to Alcoa, have brought the park to 5,881 acres.

Morrow Mountain State ParkTopoSatelliteStreetsTake the tour ▶

1Morrow Mountain2Sugarloaf Mountain3Hattaway Mountain4Fall Mountain5Park office6Boathouse7Kron House (approx.)

Morrow Mountain State ParkTap a numbered pin to read what happened there.

The CCC and the WPA

Land alone does not make a park. The roads, buildings and water lines at Morrow Mountain were built by two New Deal programs working side by side. The Civilian Conservation Corps enrolled unemployed young men, housed them in camps and put them to work on public land. The state’s records identify the camp at Morrow Mountain as NC SP-8, the designation used for a camp assigned to a state park. The Works Progress Administration hired local unemployed adults for construction jobs. The state’s plan says both agencies began work soon after the land was donated in February 1935.

The CCC was the most popular of the New Deal’s relief programs. Its enrollees were mostly single men in their late teens and early twenties from families on relief. They lived under Army supervision in barracks camps, worked under foresters and park engineers, and were paid $30 a month, of which $25 was sent home to their families. For many it was a first steady job, and for a rural county it meant a payroll and a market at a time when both were scarce.

The Stanly News & Press has reported that the CCC spent seven years on the park and that about 400 workers lived in a camp on the site. The official record supplies the sequence. The general development plan was completed on February 25, 1937. By September 9 of that year two miles of road had been graded and surfaced and two more graded, the picnic shelter on top of Morrow Mountain was finished, and work on the summit parking lot had begun.

The WPA finished the swimming pool and its bathhouse in the spring of 1939. During 1939 and 1940 crews installed two water systems and built the family picnic area, a parking area for a hundred cars at the lodge site, and the concession building at the pool. The WPA worked on the lodge from the second half of 1940 through the first half of 1941. By the time the CCC camp was disbanded in 1942, with the country at war, the park also had two ranger residences, a maintenance yard with a garage, tool house and shop, a barn, a barracks for summer employees and an enlarged parking area on the summit.

The builders worked in the rustic style that the National Park Service promoted for parks across the country in the 1930s: local stone, heavy timber, and buildings kept low so that they would sit quietly in the landscape. Much of that work survives. The state’s management plan notes original bathhouses, a barbecue building and stone walls from the period, and the museum is built of argillite quarried inside the park.

Visitors who know what to look for can still read the 1930s in the landscape. The route of the summit road, the stonework, the pool and its bathhouse and the low profile of the older buildings are all part of the original design. Stanly County’s history of the Kron family adds a local touch: it says the old Kron farmhouse served the designers as a model for the lodge.

Opening day and dedication

The park opened to the public on August 17, 1939, before everything was finished. The formal dedication came the following summer, on June 29, 1940. The State Archives of North Carolina holds a set of photographs assembled in 1942 as a pictorial review of the state parks, and several show the Morrow Mountain ceremony. One is captioned “Paul McNutt speaking at dedication and official opening of Morrow Mountain State Park.” Paul V. McNutt, a former governor of Indiana, was then head of the Federal Security Agency, the department that oversaw the CCC. Another photograph shows the reviewing stand, hung with bunting.

The same album records what a visitor saw in the park’s first seasons: a large roadside sign with the gate and gatehouse behind it, the view of the Pee Dee River from the concession stand on the summit, the mountain itself from the ranger’s house, and the comfort station on top. James McKnight Morrow lived to see it. He died in 1941.

One fact about the new park is absent from the dedication photographs but belongs in its history. North Carolina’s state parks were segregated when Morrow Mountain opened. Jones Lake in Bladen County had opened on July 1, 1939, about six weeks earlier, as the state’s first park for African Americans, and Morrow Mountain, like the other parks of that time, was reserved for white visitors. The park system was not opened to all visitors on equal terms until the 1960s.

Eight period images. The first seven are pages from the State Archives’ 1942 pictorial review of the state parks.

The summit: map and satelliteDrag the handle left and right

Topographic mapSatellite today

After the war

Development stopped during the Second World War and resumed afterward with state money. The park plan records large-scale maintenance from 1945 to 1948 and the construction of six vacation cabins in the same years. A $93,000 appropriation in 1947 paid for new facilities, and by 1954 the tent and trailer campgrounds were operating, the boathouse and dock were complete and a natural history museum had been built.

The 1960s brought the park’s main historical exhibit. Research on the Kron family began early in the decade, a road to the homesite was surveyed in 1964 and paved in 1966, and by the end of the decade the doctor’s house, office and greenhouse stood again at the foot of Fall Mountain. In 1966 the park also added two camping areas of thirty sites each.

Storms and repairs

A forested park on a ridge is exposed to weather, and Morrow Mountain has been closed by storms several times. Hurricane Hugo shut it for two weeks in 1989. Hurricane Fran, in September 1996, did far worse, and parts of the park did not reopen until January 25, 1997. A blizzard in January 2000 closed it for three months, an ice storm closed parts of it in December 2002, and a windstorm on June 13, 2013 closed it for about two months.

The park today

Morrow Mountain is often described as the third-oldest state park in North Carolina, after Mount Mitchell and Fort Macon, and it was the first in the middle of the state. It now covers 5,881 acres, with more than 30 miles of hiking and bridle trails, 106 family campsites, six cabins, a boathouse and launch on Lake Tillery and a swimming pool open from Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day. The park counted 512,427 visits in 2016, 452,862 in 2019 and 512,702 in 2020, a year in which it was closed for six weeks.

The summit overlook was rebuilt in 2020 with a new observation deck donated by the Rabe family, and the state has since funded new cabins, shower houses, pool renovations and accessibility work on the summit. The trails, many of them laid out fifty or sixty years ago, are slated for renovation.

For hours, camping and a suggested day in the park, see our Morrow Mountain guide and fall day itinerary. The park’s own museum and the Stanly County Museum in Albemarle both hold material on the building of the park.

Story versus record

Questions and answers

Sources

1. North Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Community Development, Morrow Mountain State Park Plan (February 1979), history section, reproduced on NCpedia.
2. North Carolina Division of Parks and Recreation, Morrow Mountain State Park General Management Plan.
3. State Archives of North Carolina, “Pictorial Review of North Carolina State Parks 1942,” Conservation and Development Department, Division of State Parks records (photographs and typed captions).
4. State Archives of North Carolina, “Documents regarding the closing of CCC camps NC SP-5 at Hanging Rock State Park and NC SP-8 at Morrow Mountain State Park,” North Carolina Digital Collections.
5. Charles Curcio, “Spirit of Stanly: Morrow Mountain looks to the future,” Stanly News & Press, March 27, 2021.
6. NCpedia, “History of North Carolina State Parks,” part 3 (creation of the Branch of State Parks, 1935).
7. N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, “Rabe family donates new observation deck to Morrow Mountain State Park,” July 21, 2020.
8. The Living New Deal, “Morrow Mountain State Park, Albemarle NC.”
9. “Morrow Mountain State Park,” Wikipedia (geology, quarry, trail list and storm closures, with citations to the Stanly News and Press and state sources).
10. Memorial plaque to James McKnight Morrow, Morrow Mountain State Park (dates 1864–1941).

Photo and image credits (17)

Autumn color over the Uwharrie ridges from Morrow Mountain State Park — Hathcock / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
Upper Lake Tillery from the summit of Morrow Mountain — Donald (Donnie) Pardue / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
Panorama from the summit of Morrow Mountain, June 2023 — DiscoA340 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Morrow Mountain observation deck, June 2023 — DiscoA340 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
View over the North Carolina Piedmont from Morrow Mountain — Stuart Borrett / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
Panorama of Morrow Mountain State Park from Buck Mountain — Wasrts / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Morrow Mountain Road in the state park — DiscoA340 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Morrow Mountain State Park visitor center and museum — DiscoA340 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Plaque honoring James McKnight Morrow — Wasrts / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Paul McNutt speaking at the dedication of Morrow Mountain State Park — State Archives of North Carolina, "Pictorial Review of North Carolina State Parks 1942" / Wikimedia Commons, no known copyright restrictions
Reviewing stand at the Morrow Mountain State Park dedication — State Archives of North Carolina, "Pictorial Review of North Carolina State Parks 1942" / Wikimedia Commons, no known copyright restrictions
Park sign, gate and gatehouse at Morrow Mountain State Park, 1942 — State Archives of North Carolina, "Pictorial Review of North Carolina State Parks 1942" / Wikimedia Commons, no known copyright restrictions
Morrow Mountain State Park entrance from the main road, 1942 — State Archives of North Carolina, "Pictorial Review of North Carolina State Parks 1942" / Wikimedia Commons, no known copyright restrictions
View from the concession stand atop Morrow Mountain, 1942 — State Archives of North Carolina, "Pictorial Review of North Carolina State Parks 1942" / Wikimedia Commons, no known copyright restrictions
Morrow Mountain seen from the ranger's house, 1942 — State Archives of North Carolina, "Pictorial Review of North Carolina State Parks 1942" / Wikimedia Commons, no known copyright restrictions
Comfort station on the summit of Morrow Mountain, 1942 — State Archives of North Carolina, "Pictorial Review of North Carolina State Parks 1942" / Wikimedia Commons, no known copyright restrictions
Postcard of Morrow Mountain State Park with swimming pool inset — Stanly County Museum via Digital Public Library of America / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Charts, tables, timelines and map overlays: original work by The Stanly County Guide. Basemap tiles © Esri and data partners.