Wedding DJ at Macguire’s Millrace Farm in Murphy, NC

The Space

Six generations of the McGuire family have lived and worked this 110-acre farm in Murphy, and the wedding business began in 1999 when Linda McGuire asked her sisters, Margie Foster Stroud and Donna Foster Bryant, to help her open a wedding chapel. The sisters leased the historic Harshaw Chapel from the Daughters of the American Revolution, a building listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and built the rest of the property’s event spaces around it.

The barn is the centerpiece, over 8,000 square feet with 30-foot tongue and groove ceilings hung with 30 wrought iron chandeliers strung with more than 2,000 crystals. A floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace and polished concrete floors give the room a finished, formal feel despite its size, and the barn is fully heated and air-conditioned, so neither a cold mountain evening nor a summer afternoon changes the plan.

Capacity & Layout

Seated capacity runs to about 190 guests at the property’s most popular sites, with standing capacity closer to 200 depending on setup, numbers large enough to cover most weddings without feeling like the barn is being stretched past what it was built for. A 25-foot by 25-foot dance floor with built-in lighting sits inside that same room, sized to the barn rather than dropped in as an afterthought.

Outdoors, the farm offers a ceremony lawn with an arched footbridge over a pond, flower gardens, and a birch garden, alongside a solid wood arbor for the ceremony itself. The property also holds two structures older than the wedding business itself, a Country Store dated to before the Depression and the Original McGuire Homestead, which predates the Civil War, both part of the grounds a couple can use for photographs.

Amenities

Catering runs in-house through a certified commercial kitchen with a certified chef, and the barn’s two-piece bar, finished with granite countertops and a gold-plated sink, handles service through the reception. A firepit and a separate outdoor bar extend the evening outside the barn once dinner winds down, and a lit, handicap-accessible parking lot keeps arrival straightforward after dark.

Lodging is available on site, six rooms holding 30 people total, so a wedding party can stay through the weekend rather than driving in and out of Murphy. The farm’s 2014 Best of B&B Award for Most Romantic Venue in the Asheville area recognizes the same combination of details, the chandeliers, the gardens, the historic chapel, that a couple sees on a walkthrough.

Location & Getting There

The farm sits in Murphy, in the far western corner of North Carolina, on 110 acres that have stayed in one family for six generations. That kind of continuity shows in how the grounds are kept, working farmland alongside gardens and historic buildings rather than a property built from scratch for weddings alone.

We have worked a wedding in this barn before, and its scale changes how sound sits in the room. Thirty-foot ceilings and polished concrete floors carry volume further than a lower, carpeted space would, while the stone fireplace and the chandeliers overhead break up some of that openness, so we adjust levels for a tall, hard-surfaced room rather than treating it like a standard ballroom.