The Story Behind The Historic Farmhouse
James Wilburn Whitehead could sit on the front porch of his home just outside Banner's Elk and look out over the hundreds of acres that he owned. From the time he built his home in 1885 until he died in 1924, he had the pleasure of living and working on the large farm with his wife, Jennie, and their children. When he died at the age of 73, James was considered one of the richest men in the area.
James experienced significant changes and losses in his early years. Born in 1851 in Elk Mills, TN, he was the oldest of five children born to Daniel Whitehead and Lurany Holtsclaw Dugger. When James lost his mother at the age of six, his father soon remarried. At the age of 13 he was indentured to a family traveling by wagon train to Illinois. When he returned to Tennessee at age 20, he learned that his father had died and his stepmother had remarried. In 1872, he showed up in Banner's Elk with a gun, two hogs, and a dog in tow.
By the time James was 30, he had obtained a land grant for 600 acres on Buckeye Creek on Beech Mountain and three years later purchased an additional 480 acres on Big Bottoms of Elk. Elk River Valley proved to be the ideal place for James to build his fortune. He trapped minks and muskrats in Elk River and hunted weasels, possums, raccoons, wolves, and bears in the deep forests. He raised cattle and sheep and let his hogs run wild on Beech Mountain. He grew oats, barley, buckwheat, cabbage, and potatoes on the farm and tapped the maple trees for syrup, sugar, and candy. In the early 1900s he leased large tracts of timber to the big lumber companies operating in the area.
Known to be frugal with his money, James once invested in a Valle Crucis bank, which went bankrupt. He never trusted banks after that and stashed his money in canning jars that he hid in the hog lot on the farm. According to a memorial written by a neighbor, “James was considered a shrewd businessman and always dressed in a suit… His word was his bond… he was never known to owe any man a cent by note or otherwise.”
James married Martha Jane “Jennie” Hayes of Watauga County in 1885. They had five children. Addie J., the oldest, died at the age of three. Sally Louise, Thomas J., George Washington, and Mattie Virginia grew up and pursued their own interests. James succumbed to cancer in 1924, and Jennie died in 1956. Their son, George, and his wife, Mabel, continued to live on the farm, raising livestock and crops. In 1964, they sold their home and most of the land around it to the developer of Elk River Club. The sale took its toll on George. He died in 1972, as the last of his cabbage patches were bulldozed to make room for an airport. Mabel passed away in 1993 at the age of 95. Both are buried in the family cemetery below the Old Turnpike Road along with other family members.
Elk River Club leased the farmhouse to various individuals before selling it for $5,000 in 1975 to Dennis Lehmann, a land planner for Carolina Caribbean Corporation. By that time, various tenants had almost destroyed the Whitehead house, leaving it with no plumbing, no electricity, and no heat, and much of the roof and wood rotten.
After 20 years of owning and extensively renovating the home, Lehmann decided to sell the historic property and posted a hand-lettered “4-SALE” sign out front. That’s when Cheryl Richardson came barreling down the road and slammed on her brakes to get a better view of the place. “When I saw the old farmhouse, I said, ‘This is it!’ My husband Edwin and I painted all the rooms and continued to work on the house for the next 26 years,” she recalls. “We furnished it with 19th-century East Coast antiques that we had stored over the years. During the time we lived here, I worked on getting the Old Turnpike Road declared a North Carolina Scenic Byway, which was granted in 2018. It is one of the few, if not the only, original 19th-century turnpikes in the state.”
In 2020, the Richardsons sold the farmhouse, including all the furnishings, to Dennis Lehmann’s son and daughter-in-law, Paul and Fabiana Lehmann, with the understanding they would preserve the historical integrity of the house and make necessary improvements. Since then, Paul, an experienced custom home builder, and Fabiana have worked continuously to update the home and ensure that it is structurally sound.
“I always wanted to own the house,” says Paul. “Now that my wife and I have completed the restoration, the house is finally comfortable, warm, and cozy year round. It is such a unique, beautiful, historic home — it would be selfish to keep it all to ourselves. We want to share it with families who want to make memories and who will appreciate its history and charm.”
Visitors who stay at the historic home may gather eggs and feed the goats and horses. They can share stories around the fire pit, and they can sit on the big front porch and take in the beauty of Elk River Valley and the surrounding mountains, just as James Wilburn Whitehead and his family did in their lifetimes.
Historical Timeline of Old Turnpike Road
What would eventually become a vital mountain highway began as a game trail worn by animals, then widened into a footpath by the region's first settlers. Over time it became a wagon-rutted dirt road, connecting the communities of Valle Crucis and Banner Elk to the railroad at Cranberry and the larger towns of Elizabethton and Johnson City in Tennessee.
Between Banner Elk and Elk Park, the road followed a path level enough for oxen and horses, and high enough along the Elk River to stay passable when the river overflowed its banks. From Valle Crucis to Banner Elk, however, it was a rough, narrow, steep climb — the trail the first pioneers took to settle in the valley of the Big Bottoms of the Elk.
When iron ore was discovered in Cranberry, men walked the footpath from Banner Elk to find work in the mines. By the 1850s, the Cranberry mines were in full production and demand for labor surged. Mining had become more profitable than scratching out a subsistence living from the land.
1854–55The North Carolina State Legislature funded a bill requiring all public roads built in Watauga County to be no more than 12 feet wide where side cutting was necessary. With that, the footpath to Cranberry was officially widened into a public road.
1861–65During the Civil War, this wagon road became an important part of the Underground Railroad, used for smuggling escaped Union prisoners and Confederate draft dodgers north to Tennessee and the Union lines. An organized system of safe houses operated in Banner Elk, where local residents guided escapees through Blowing Rock, across Grandfather Mountain, and into town — then onward to safety in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Late 1800sThe road was widened again, this time to become the Valle Crucis, Shawneehaw, and Elk Park Turnpike. Built with picks, shovels, and mule-drawn scrapers, it received for the first time the official name “Turnpike.” In 1896, the postal service on horseback began carrying mail over the Turnpike between the railroad depot and the communities of Banner Elk and Valle Crucis.
1901–1931In 1901, the Elk-Park–Valle Crucis Turnpike officially became a toll road. Able-bodied men volunteered six days out of the year using their own hand tools, and in return were exempt from paying the toll. In 1921, Watauga County assumed responsibility for upkeep. In 1931, the State took over entirely.
20th CenturyIn the latter half of the 20th century, the State built a new road from Valle Crucis to Elk Park, using most of the old Turnpike’s roadbed and renaming it State Road 194. A small section of the original Turnpike was bypassed, sparing it from chainsaws and asphalt.
TodayThat surviving section of seven tenths of a mile between Silver Springs Road and Edgar Tufts Road may be one of the last remaining 19th-century highways in North Carolina that still exists in its original unpaved condition. It is canopied by specimen trees hundreds of years old and has served tens of generations of travelers for nearly 200 years.
It is a valuable historic asset to be preserved and protected.