Jonesborough

The Oldest Town and Its Strange Vocation

Jonesborough was chartered in 1779, which makes it older than the state of Tennessee itself, and for a while in the 1780s it was the capital of a breakaway state called Franklin that never quite happened. None of that is why I drove three hours east from Knoxville to get there. I came because Jonesborough is, by its own insistent branding, the Storytelling Capital of the World — a claim that sounds like a chamber-of-commerce stretch until you learn that the National Storytelling Festival, started here in 1973, genuinely invented the modern American storytelling revival.

The town itself is small and almost suspiciously well-kept. One curving main street of red-brick and white-clapboard buildings, a courthouse, a couple of churches with the kind of steeples that show up on postcards. Lia, who is skeptical of any place that describes itself in superlatives, walked the length of it in fifteen minutes and admitted, grudgingly, that it was lovely. The preservation is real and old, not a recent themed makeover. People have simply kept this street standing for two centuries.

Sitting in a Tent, Being Told Things

We timed our visit badly — the big festival is the first weekend of October and we came in summer — but the International Storytelling Center on Main Street runs tellers throughout the season, and we caught an afternoon session almost by accident. I will confess I expected this to be twee. It was not. An older man from East Tennessee told a story about his father and a mule and a flooded creek that ran maybe twenty minutes, with no notes, and by the end the whole tent was silent in the particular way that means people are working not to cry. I have paid a lot of money for theater that did less.

That, I think, is the actual point of Jonesborough. Storytelling here is not a gimmick draped over a heritage town. The town and the craft have grown into each other. The festival brings tens of thousands of people every October and the rest of the year the place runs quiet, a working Appalachian town with a peculiar specialty.

Around the Edges

Beyond the stories, there is good slow time to be had. We ate fried catfish at a place on Main and bought local honey from a man who told us, of course, a story about his bees. The surrounding hills are classic upper-East-Tennessee country — folded green ridges, the Nolichucky River nearby for paddling, the larger town of Johnson City fifteen minutes away if you need actual amenities. It is not a place you visit for a week. It is a place you visit for a day and a half and leave wanting to be a better listener.

When to go: Early October for the National Storytelling Festival, which is the full experience but books out months ahead and crowds the town. Late spring and early autumn otherwise, when the hills are at their best and the Storytelling Center has regular programming.