The French Broad River played a major role in this region’s early development. Initially called the “Broad River” by eighteenth-century French hunters and traders, it was later named the French Broad River. With headwaters on Pisgah Ridge twenty miles southeast of here, it flows through the mountains near Asheville and merges with the Holston River at Knoxville. The French Broad’s wide banks provided a convenient passageway through Western North Carolina’s rugged mountains, so much so that it was once the main thoroughfare between the Carolinas and Tennessee. Often with herds containing thousands, nineteenth-century drovers moved cattle, horses, hogs, ducks and turkeys along this lengthy route to southern markets.