Drovers Road

Drovers Road is a 16.5-mile North Carolina scenic byway on US Highway 74A, tracing a route that began as a Cherokee trail. It later became one of the busiest livestock droving roads in the early American South. Eighteenth-century settlers first used the path to reach the Hickory Nut Gorge by covered wagon, and by the early 1800s it had become a seasonal highway for drovers, the men who walked hogs, cattle, horses, mules, turkeys, and ducks from farms in western North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky down to markets in South Carolina and Georgia. Traffic grew so heavy, up to 150,000 animals a month by 1824, that the state formalized the corridor as the Buncombe Turnpike. Today's byway runs from the Blue Ridge Parkway north of Fairview south to Bat Cave, where it connects directly to the Black Mountain Rag Scenic Byway on NC Highway 9. The droving era ended once rail reached Asheville in the 1880s, but the road's name still commemorates the herders who once moved a large share of the region's livestock economy on foot along this exact corridor.

• US Highway 74A
• 16.5 miles
• Blue Ridge Parkway to Bat Cave
• originally a Cherokee trail
• 1800s livestock droving route
• became Buncombe Turnpike (1824)
• connects to Black Mountain Rag Scenic Byway