What happened here?
The A. P. Carter Homeplace in Maces Spring, Scott County, Virginia, is the birthplace of Alvin Pleasant "A.P." Delaney Carter (1891–1960), the patriarch of the Carter Family — the group widely regarded as the first family of American country music. The house is a small, one-storey, half-dovetailed log cabin with a single room on the ground floor and a loft above. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
A.P. Carter, along with his wife Sara and his sister-in-law Maybelle, made their first recordings at the famous Bristol Sessions in August 1927 — the same sessions that launched Jimmie Rodgers. Over the next three decades, the Carter Family recorded over 300 songs, including "Wildwood Flower," "Keep On the Sunny Side," "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," and "Wabash Cannonball." Their recordings preserved and popularised Appalachian folk songs that might otherwise have been lost, and their guitar style — particularly Maybelle's "Carter scratch" — became the foundation of country and folk guitar playing.
The homeplace sits within a cluster of Carter Family historic sites in Maces Spring, including the A. P. and Sara Carter House, the Maybelle and Ezra Carter House, the A. P. Carter Store, and the Mt. Vernon Methodist Church. Together they form a small historic district in a remote valley of the Clinch Mountains, near the Tennessee border.
Adjacent to the site is the Carter Family Fold — an outdoor music venue founded in 1979 by Janette Carter, daughter of A.P. and Sara. The Fold hosts weekly Saturday night concerts from February to November, featuring live bluegrass and old-time music performed on a wooden stage with no electrical instruments allowed. A museum on site displays family artefacts, photographs, instruments, and recordings.
Maces Spring is deep in the Appalachian backcountry of southwestern Virginia — a long drive from any major city. That remoteness is part of the point. The Carter Family's music came from this landscape, and visiting the homeplace means understanding the isolation and beauty that shaped one of the most influential catalogues in American music.