Murphy, North Carolina

On Friday we took a little road trip for the day to North Carolina.  We drove three hours to the southwest corner of NC to the town of Murphy.  Murphy is the county seat of Cherokee County and sits along the Hiwassee and Valley rivers.  It was known to the Cherokee as Tiarusi ( the Leech Place) due to a legend about a giant leech named Tiarusi that lived in the river.  The Trading Path, later called the Unicoi Turnpike, passed by what is Murphy today.  It connected the Cherokee lands east of the mountains with Overhill towns of Tennessee.  At that time, Murphy was called Huntington after the first Post Master, Col. H.R.S. Hunter when the town was established in 1835.  It was later changed to Murphy named after Archibald Murphy, a NC politician.  In 1836 Fort Butler was built to aid in the removal of the Cherokee known as the Trail Of Tears.  In the 1880's Murphy was home to the Murphy Branch Raliroad.  Murphy was also the home of the once well known crafts manufacturer Margaret Studios which operated a nationwide chain of gift shops that sold its woodcraf products and housewares.  John Jacob Niles based his Christmas song, "I Wonder As I Wander", on a phrase he heard while in downtownMurphy on July 16, 1933.  Murphy is also the town where Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bomber, was arrested in 2003.  It is a small town with a population of a little over 1800 but to us it will be the town where we visited the showroom of Real Cheap Floors.com and George and Lisa found their wood flooring for their home.