One of North Carolina’s growing tourism destinations is near Collettsville in Caldwell County. Clearly, this “attraction” is off the beaten path, on a dirt road that looks up at the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The Collettsville Cup House has become a sight-seers delight. Located on Old Johns River Road, the cabin in the woods that is the home of Avery and Doris Sisk is literally plastered with coffee mugs, nailed to the walls inside and out.
They’ve got more mugs than
wall space, so now the outbuildings, archways and wooden fences are covered
with mugs, too.
Shucks, Avery doesn’t even drink coffee. He “blames” his sister, Ruby Shook, for getting them hooked about 20 years ago.
She thought the place needed a little sprucing up and decided to decorate with an artistic display of 15 coffee mugs that she picked up at the local flea market for 2 cents apiece.
Now, there are about 30,000 mugs in their collection as well as an untold number of unopened boxes crammed full of mugs that are being held in reserve.
Their stash continues to grow, because the Sisks are happy to receive mugs from the thousands of tourists who drop by each year. Many accept an invitation to sit a spell and hear Avery’s stories about the collection.
The Sisks count the mugs once a year, as sort of a family ritual. The guestbook register includes folks from all over the world, including Iceland, as Avery is always prone to mention, because he thinks “it’s cool.”
Everyone wants to know if there is a family favorite mug. Avery will rise up out of his chair and pull one down – located over a door frame on the inside of the cabin.
He’s not about to leave
his prized President Ronald Reagan mug exposed to the elements.
It’s a little more than an hour’s drive south from Collettsville to Dellview in the upper lefthand corner of Gaston County. Dellview is North Carolina’s smallest municipality, with a population of seven…or thereabouts.
Dellview was chartered as a town by the state legislature in 1925, incorporating the Dellinger family’s farms into a municipality. The bill was engineered by family member Davis Dellinger, who was a lawyer and a delegate to the legislature.
As a town, a local ordinance was immediately adopted to put an end to stray dogs trespassing and raiding the Dellinger chicken coops.
They took the beginning of the family name and combined it with “view” to form Dellview. They had just enough Dellingers living within the new town limits to occupy the key positions of mayor, police chief, town clerk and postmaster. Town Hall was located inside Dellinger’s Woodworking Shop on Main Street. The street sign was hand-lettered.
There is an official town
sign with the word “Dellview” located along Delview Road. Nobody is quite sure
where the boundary line is between Dellview and neighboring Cherryville, and no
one seems to know how or when the name of the road lost an “l,” but that’s part
of the charm of a tiny town.
Today, Dr. Van Dellinger serves as de facto mayor. He has a day-job as an optometrist in Cherryville. His grandparents and great uncles and great aunts were part of history, as the first inhabitants of Dellview.
“It hasn’t grown, but it
hasn’t died, either,” he’s proud to say.
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