There are towns that preserve their history behind glass, and then there is Jonesborough, Tennessee, where somebody will probably tell you about it before you have finished your coffee.
Founded in 1779, seventeen years before Tennessee became a state, Jonesborough sits among the Appalachian foothills of northeastern Tennessee looking remarkably comfortable with its age. Brick sidewalks wander past Federal and Victorian buildings. Porches seem designed for people with nowhere urgent to be. Trains still rumble through town. Main Street is compact enough that getting lost would require considerable determination.
Jonesborough’s real specialty, however, is storytelling.
Every October, the town hosts the National Storytelling Festival, which this year runs October 2 through 4. Thousands of listeners gather beneath enormous tents to hear storytellers do something increasingly radical: stand on a stage with little more than a microphone and keep an audience completely absorbed.
The festival began rather less grandly in 1973, when local teacher Jimmy Neil Smith pulled a farm wagon near the courthouse and invited Appalachian storytellers to climb aboard. Around 60 people showed up. The experiment helped ignite a national revival of oral storytelling and eventually established Jonesborough as America’s unofficial storytelling capital.
The idea feels perfectly at home here.
Walk down Main Street to the Chester Inn, built in 1797 along an important stage route. Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson all stayed there. Travelers once gathered around the inn’s fireplace swapping news and stories, which suggests Jonesborough had discovered podcasting approximately two centuries early.
The inn is now a museum, and the surrounding streets provide plenty of reasons to linger between festival performances. Historic storefronts house independent shops and galleries. Appalachian crafts sit comfortably beside cafes and restaurants. Around nearly every corner is another porch, staircase, brick facade or hand-painted sign begging to be photographed.
Jonesborough also rewards visitors who arrive outside festival weekend. The International Storytelling Center hosts performances throughout much of the year, while walking tours unpack a history considerably more complicated than the town’s postcard appearance suggests, including early abolitionism, Civil War divisions, immigration and the occasionally unruly politics of frontier Tennessee.
Autumn, however, is when Jonesborough makes the most persuasive case for itself. The Appalachian hills begin changing color, evenings turn cool enough for jackets, and thousands of strangers willingly sit together and listen.
In an age when almost everyone is trying to say something, Jonesborough has built its reputation on the increasingly rare pleasure of listening.
That alone may be worth the trip.
Photo: Sodei8971 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0