Asheville, North Carolina History

The best way to learn more about Asheville's history is by taking the Urban Trail. The 1.7-mile walking tour was conceived in 1991 as an entertaining, artistic, and informative walk through Asheville history, featuring many of the city's memories and architecture from earlier times to the present.

The trail is divided into different time periods, instead of the entire trail, beginning in front of the Asheville Art Museum at Pack Square, where the participants listen to the story of Asheville's earliest days as a backcountry settlement.

Before European colonization, the region served as open game land. The first Pioneers who settled Western North Carolina saw a wildlife heaven and were mostly of Irish and Scottish descent.

Early settlers applied their shooting skills to the winning of American independence at the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780. In 1784, the young pioneer William Davidson and his family moved through the Blue Ridge Mountains to settle in the Swannanoa Valley, area known as "Eden Land".

A year later, permanent settlement increased, but the wilderness lifestyle wiped out the supposed inexhaustible resources of North Carolina, such as the buffalo in 1799 and the panther in 1832. During the 19th century, it was estimated that just 1,000 people lived in this small, remote village, which was originally named Morristown.

Morristown was renamed Asheville NC in honor of North Carolina's popular governor Samuel Ashe, and after a petition to the North Carolina General Assembly in 1792 to form their own county, Buncombe County, honoring the Revolutionary War hero Edward Buncombe.

Asheville was incorporated on January 27, 1798, but the original design of the town was totally different to the well-planned city squares, markets and parks as it looks today.

Asheville was practically carved out of the surrounding mountains and holding close relations to Tennessee, because there was no road connecting the town to the rest of the state, but the confluence of the French Broad River made it easier for communication with the neighbor state.

A road parallel to this river served as the path into eastern Tennessee and Kentucky between 1828 and 1880, the period of time in which Asheville remained isolated from the outside world. In 1851 James Patton established the "Asheville and Greenville Plank Road", considered the first health resort in the region.

The Cherokee were usually seen near by, because of the healing waters of what is now Hot Springs. Asheville became a vital Confederate military center during the Civil War because of its strategic location in the Blue Ridge Mountains. However, this mountainous terrain and inaccessibility to the backcountry, made it impractical for trade and commerce.

The impact of established cultural institutions was minimal and families could not afford slaves, but they usually grew only enough food to feed their own households. Furthermore, the local government was extremely corrupt in the backcountry and legislature turned deaf ears towards the backcountry.

It was not until the late 1880, with the opening of railroads that important changes arose. Asheville's population quadrupled within a decade and the town experienced an overall growth and development.

In 1883, Asheville was declared a city, and the first streetlights went up in 1888. Just one year later, first electric streetcars were seen here, making the city, the second in America to have electric streetcars.

Trains brought money, and the city changed its shape, becoming a peaceful and elegant place to live. Power was on its way, when a young aristocrat from New York visited Asheville in the 1880s. George Vanderbilt visited the city with his mother and found what he described later as the most beautiful place in the world.

Vanderbilt purchased 125,000 acres to develop what is now America's largest private house, built from 1890 to 1895, the house is 255-room, and resembles a French Renaissance château, including surrounding grounds. Biltmore, a name derived from "Bildt", the Dutch town home of Vanderbilt ancestors with the suffix "moore" an old English word meaning rolling, mountainous country.

However, Biltmore Estate was not the main attraction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but Asheville's climate itself. Weather was considered ideal for the treatment of many illnesses, including tuberculosis. Cherokee healing practices spread also beyond the region. More and more wealthy people continued arriving to the city by this time.

The Urban Trail gives the visitor an up close and personal glance into those early beautiful buildings that the wealthy people constructed to stay, relocating their homes to "The Land of the Sky". The most remarkable examples of Art Deco surviving buildings along the Trail are the City Building, the S&W Building, and the First Baptist Church, as well as the first indoor mall in America, located near the actual Battery Park Hotel.

The 1900's brought Asheville an economic and artistic impressing growth. Writer O. Henry arrived to the city in 1908 seeking a cure for his neurasthenia, and making of Asheville his second home. Today he is buried at the city's cemetery, where other important writers, artists and politicians lie in peace.

The church community’s history began to be written when the Spanish designer Rafael Guastavino incorporated distinctive stylistic techniques to construct the St. Lawrence Catholic Church in 1909.

Guastavino used a method called "cohesive construction" to build a dome measuring 52 feet by 82 feet, which is the largest unsupported tile dome in America, which received the distinction of minor basilica in recent years.

Like in all the United States, people celebrated the booming economy of the 1920s, ignoring the financial doom waiting around the corner. The Central Bank and Trust Company, the major holder of county funds, was declared insolvent on November 20, 1930, silencing abruptly Asheville's financial grow.

The Great Depression had arrived to North Carolina and the massive debt for the city and county loomed as sanitary and schools districts were deprived of their usual much-needed funds.

Since then, Asheville would also make fame retaining the highest per capita debt of any other city in America, and until 1977 when all bonds were paid, and the city began its growing from then to the present day.