Education

The mountain's ecology is diverse; it includes chestnut oak, dry coniferous, pine-oak/heath and oak-hickory forest. The mountain has a low-elevation rocky summit with both acidic and rich cove forest features.

Visitors have explored Rendezvous Mountain for nearly a century. This mountain has welcomed the public as a state park, a state forest, and a state educational forest through the years.

The area around Rendezvous Mountain has a long American history beginning with the Tutelo and Cherokee, followed by German and Scotch-Irish settlers. The name "Rendezvous" likely comes from local stories of the mountain serving as an assembly point for Overmountain Men during the American Revolutionary War. Here, Col. Benjamin Cleveland reportedly rallied troops with a horn used as a trumpet that resonated through the valleys below. The militia continued to use the mountain as a meeting point for years, including just prior to the Battle of Kings Mountain — a turning point in the Revolutionary War.

The Overmountain Men were frontiersmen from west of the Appalachian continental divide in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Armed with hunting rifles and wearing plain clothes, many marched hundreds of miles to fight in the pivotal Battle for Kings Mountain in 1780.

Rendezvous Mountain was established as North Carolina's third state park in 1926, before becoming a state forest in 1956. In the 1930s, Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) workers built a road and trails and managed the forest. These young men made $1 per day as part of our country's largest federal employment effort during the Great Depression. A CCC-built cabin remains near the mountain summit.

In 1956, the park was transferred to the state's Division of Forestry (now the N.C. Forest Service).

The park operated as Rendezvous Mountain Educational State Forest between 1984 and 2022. School children and landowners alike visited to learn about sustainable forestry.