S5, E38: Asheville History and the Making of a Mountain City | The Travel Guide

Welcome to the first stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina. And where better to start than at the beginning? In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene sets out on foot to trace Asheville history from the ground up, and to answer a simple question: How did a remote, hard-to-reach valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains become one of the most creative small cities in America?

Aislyn’s first guide reveals the deep Asheville history hiding in plain sight downtown. There are the ancient mountains and rivers, the Cherokee crossroads that predated the city by thousands of years, the rowdy cattle-drive era that gave the town its early reputation, and the arrival of the railroad in 1880, which brought the Vanderbilts, the Groves, and the money that built landmarks like the Grove Arcade.

From there, Aislyn drives out to the Biltmore Estate, America’s largest privately owned home, to meet Chase Pickering, a fifth-generation member of the Vanderbilt family. He shares what it was like to grow up on the estate, and why stewardship and sustainability still shape the property today.

But no honest telling of Asheville history is complete without the Black community that helped build the city, including Biltmore itself. Aislyn rides through the historically Black neighborhoods of Eagle Street and Burton Street with DeWayne Barton of Hood Huggers, meets community elder Clifford Cotton, grandson of the pioneering entrepreneur E.W. Pearson, and hears a song from Asheville artist Virtuous.

It all adds up to a rich piece of cultural travel and the story of how Asheville became Asheville: a place ringed by mountains where people have both passed through and put down deep roots. Consider this your starting point for planning Asheville travel, and your first look at one of the South’s most distinctive travel destinations. It’s also your reminder that the best trips start with knowing where to go and why a place is the way it is.

Transcript

Aislyn: For most of its history, Asheville, North Carolina was hard to get to. The mountains that everyone comes for now were for a long time the thing that kept the world out. So the city learned to make its own everything, its own art, its own music, its own food, its own way of putting itself back together.

I’m Aislyn Greene and this is Unpacked by Afar. Most weeks we roam to different topics. This week we’re staying put. And in fact, we made you a guide to 1 place, 5 episodes, 1 city, all of it reported on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina earlier this year. So think of this as your audio guide to Asheville, where to go, what to know, and everything worth unpacking in between. And what better way to begin than at Asheville’s beginning? That’s after the break.

Tebbé: Billions of years ago. Asheville and the surrounding areas was the Grand Canyon. That river is one of the oldest rivers in the world. The mountains that surround Asheville are the oldest mountains in the world. When Terra Nova came out of the earth and said, hey, we’re dirt! It was right here.

Aislyn: This is Tebbé Davis, a guide with Asheville by Foot Tours.

Tebbé: My name is Tebbé Davis. T e b b e with a little accent over the last E. And today we’re going to be walking around Asheville. And I’m going to show you the architecture, the history, the personalities, current affairs, all kinds of good stuff. We’ll even look at things that aren’t there anymore and try to imagine what they were like way back when.

Aislyn: I can’t wait.

Tebbé: You need an imagination for me.

Aislyn: It’s true. And if you want to imagine Tebbé, picture Jack Nicholson, if he were a jazz musician, like funky glasses, a leather jacket and much less frightening eyebrows. So it comes as no surprise to find out that Tebbé is an artist. Like many others who choose to make Asheville their home right now. Tebbé and I are standing at the intersection of Biltmore and Broadway, the physical center of the city of Asheville.

Tebbé: When the Cherokees came here. This was their downtown. This road going down south goes all the way to Tallahassee, Florida. This road going north goes all the way to Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio to get to Canada. But this was the Cherokee Highway that they carved out of the landscape 10,000 years ago. When the white man came here in the 1780s, he took over the city that was vacant, empty, and depleted of all anything and put their buildings on the same spots where the other buildings were.

Aislyn: So the Cherokee had left.

Tebbé: The Cherokee had been decimated by Fernando de Soto in 1512. So the Cherokee were not favorable to white people coming here. Okay. And so a white man came into these mountains in the 1720s and 30s and yellow fever spread, and it killed a lot of people. And they said, screw these white people. And they got on the river and went up and over and into the Smokies, where they are to this day. Same tribe.

Aislyn: Today. Asheville is home to nearly 100,000 people, and there are 3 or 4 times that many in the larger metro area. But 80 years after the first European immigrants settled here, it still had less than 1,000 residents because it was pretty much just a stop along the Drovers Highway.

Tebbé: And that Drovers Highway means cattle came through town. 8 months of the year going from the farms in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, all the way down to South Carolina, where the marketplaces were in Greenville, Spartanburg, Columbia, Atlanta. That’s where they sold their cattle. Then they came back through here. So Asheville had an opportunity back then to be that place where he’d come and do things you couldn’t do at home. And here’s one of my favorites. You could be with a woman that wasn’t your wife, and your wife would never know about it.

Aislyn: And long before social media.

Tebbé: Long before social media, the word of mouth was intense. Men would go back to their communities up in the hillbilly Appalachians, tell their friends that place Asheville, they got it all. It was Las Vegas here in the 1800s, but not many people lived here in the Civil War. There were only 600 people that lived in the city. There were another 1,000 that lived outside the city that communed with Asheville. So when the Civil War happened, 400 young men marched out of here to go to war, and only 37 were known to come back. Not that they all died. They just found better places to make a living. Back in the day, it was very hard to eke out a living here until the railroads showed up in 1880. Then all bets were off. The Vanderbilt showed up, the groves showed up. The patents. All these people came to town and had money.

Aislyn: This money, of course, shaped the city center. So Tebbé and I walk over to one of the most famous examples of that. It’s one of the most famous buildings in Asheville. In fact, it’s called the Grove Arcade, and it opened in the very auspicious year of 1929. It was commissioned by Edwin Grove. Edwin was a self-made millionaire who moved here for the clean mountain air after the smoke in the Saint Louis area gave him chronic hiccups. Fun little historical nugget the word arcade might bring to mind video games. Maybe the kind in a mall food court, but traditionally it’s an architectural term that refers to a row of arches supported by columns.

Aislyn: Before we go in, would you mind describing what it looks like.

Tebbé: Architectural inspiration from a guy named Charlie Parker, Charles Parker. He was hired by Mr. Grove and sent to Europe for a couple of years, maybe a year and a half or so, to investigate what Agoras was shopping centers looked like in Europe in the Middle Ages. So he came back with ideas that were basically public buildings built in the 1200s to the 1600s. And so it’s like the inner bailey of a castle. A castle is built with a residence in the middle and walls around it. And the part in between the wall and the castle is the Bailey, where shopping was done on the weekends. And they had festivals.

Aislyn: So Asheville had its own version of a European shopping center from the Middle Ages. And then things got wackier.

Tebbé: These doors were put on after the fact, and the roof, the glass roof was added after the fact. But the building is basically five different national architectural motifs from Germany, Scotland, Spain, Italy and France. And they’re just mish mash. This is a mutt of a building, but because it’s a mutt of a building, it is its own architectural design.

Aislyn: What would you say that this mish mash says about Asheville at that point in time?

Tebbé: Asheville is the melting pot of the world. You think America is a melting pot? Walk the streets of Asheville. The first question is where did you come from?

Aislyn: Tebbé, by the way, came from Connecticut, though he lived in many other places before that. The Grove also had many different lives. It was an immediate hit. Despite the depression. It actually survived the depression, but the building eventually closed to the public in 1942. But before it returned to its roots as an indoor mall, it had a strange journey. Like for a time, the government agency NOAA, was headquartered here, and it was even a kind of giant treasure chest at one point.

Tebbé: During the Second World War. This is where they hid all of the world art treasures from the national art museums. They were afraid Washington would be bombed, so they moved everything in this building, as well as the Biltmore Estate and a resort in West Virginia called Greenbrier.

Aislyn: So I imagine there was some restoration work that went into turning it back into a shopping center because.

Tebbé: And the city of Asheville bought it from the federal government for $1 in 1996 and spent 6 years renovating it back to what it was. What you’re seeing here is the original motif. This is what it was built for.

Aislyn: It still houses art today in the form of local galleries, handcrafted jewelry and artisan goods, and it houses art in culinary form along its restaurant row, where you can get New Orleans style coffee, a glass of bubbles at a champagne bar and slow cooked southern cuisine. Yum. But The Grove’s most unusual feature takes a second to register.

Tebbé: We’ve been coming uphill all the whole way.

Aislyn: Yep. Tebbé and I are walking up a hill inside the mall.

Tebbé: Here’s the way I understand how it was built. When they took the hill down, there was a brand new cathedral. The Basilica of Saint Lawrence. The basilica had just been completed in 1909. This was 1920, 1921. And they were knocking the hotel down, taking a hill down. But they weren’t allowed to blast, so they couldn’t knock a piece of granite that sits under this side of the building. So they had to make the building on a slant, but they wanted the third and second floor to be all flat. So the first floor took the hill 22 feet from that door to this door. It’s 22 feet difference.

Aislyn: And it’s a slope and not a staircase or an escalator because…

Tebbé: Because he thought women who shopped, men didn’t shop in 1925, men didn’t shop. They didn’t want to take the have to take their baby carriages up a set of stairs. This is before escalators. And so this is all on the same level. And you’ll notice each doorway. This is. I’m looking at a jewelry store here. This door cannot even open.

Aislyn: Tebbé wants to demonstrate, so he walks over to a store that has three different entrances, each with its own elevation.

Tebbé: You see that? The elevation of this floor. Stay there, stay there. Stay. Watch this.

Aislyn: He’s walking in. Oh, and he’s going up. Oh, now he’s he’s a foot taller. Foot two feet taller. Don’t come in here if you’ve had one too many.

Tebbé: There are bars in this building too. So I imagine there are some people that will come out of the sangria bar and walk downhill and say, where am I, mommy?

Aislyn: All the stores, by the way, are locally owned and operated. There are no chains allowed. And while it’s not a chain by any means, when you’re talking about the history of Asheville, especially the economic history, you can’t escape the name Vanderbilt. It’s everywhere. Tebbé’s already mentioned it once, but as we approach the front of Asheville’s Flatiron Building. He explains the origin of America’s largest privately owned home, the Biltmore Estate.

Tebbé: When George Vanderbilt came to town, this is where he stayed in 1888. He stayed here, but every day he and his 7 or 8 friends went riding into the woods. And they camped and they hunted and they fished and they rowed and they rowed and they rowed. He wanted to have a resort for himself, a place where he could relax. It ended up being the Biltmore Estate.

Aislyn: Vanderbilt ultimately acquired 125,000 acres, 87,000 of which were later sold to create the Pisgah National Forest. But the estate still sits on about 8,000 acres. So I say farewell to Tebbé and head for the Biltmore Estate, where I’m about to meet the current generation of Vanderbilts. I’m driving onto the Biltmore Estate. I guess that there are a lot of one way roads here, which is why it takes. Oh, wow. Now there’s this vast field. It feels very English all of a sudden. Like there could be hunting dogs and horses off in the distance and some, like, cool plaid. So, yeah, I’m driving toward the house where I’m going to meet the great great grandson of Vanderbilt. As I understand it, Chase Pickering. Hello. Hi. I’m Aislyn. Yeah. Chase, nice to meet you. How are you doing? Nice to meet you, too.

Chase: Thanks for taking the time. I know it’s going to pop us up to the sitting room, if that’s all right. Yes.

Aislyn: Um, Chase takes us into the oak sitting room, which is 100 percent the most gorgeous place I’ve ever done an interview. We’re surrounded by wood paneled walls, green and gold fabrics, and the original seating.

Chase: So my name is Chase Pickering, and I am vice president of guest experience at Biltmore. I’m also one of the fifth generation family members here. And so George and Edith Vanderbilt were my great great grandparents. And they’re the ones who created Biltmore 130 years ago. And we’re here sitting in the oak sitting room of Biltmore House, and we have beautiful plaster ceiling above us with incredible details and then some family portraits. George’s parents and grandfather, the Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who started the family fortune with the shipping and railroad up in New York. And then we have a beautiful portrait of my great grandmother, Cornelia Vanderbilt, as a child.

Aislyn: Yeah. I mean, everything is beautiful. It’s warm, it’s tailored, but it’s also inviting in this interesting way. Can you help me understand? So the Biltmore Estate, what is it geographically but also psychically. And what does it represent for Asheville?

Chase: Yes. So Biltmore Estate is in Asheville, North Carolina, nestled in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains and Biltmore House is America’s largest privately owned home, still owned and operated by my family today, and it sits on an 8,000-acre estate surrounded by beautiful farmlands and forests. And we have two hotels here the Inn on Biltmore Estate and Village Hotel, a winery, shops, dining and the amazing historic gardens which are some of my favorite to get lost in. Yeah.

Aislyn: Amazing. What do you think it represents for the city and how do people interact with it?

Chase: So Biltmore has always been a very important part of Asheville, going all the way back to when my great grandparents decided to open Biltmore to the public in 1930. This was right after the Great Depression, and they opened Biltmore Estate as a way to encourage tourism to the region. And we’ve been open ever since.

Aislyn: And so when I was reading about you, it seems that you grew up on the state, is that correct?

Chase: Yes, I did grow up on Biltmore Estate and it was quite a place to grow up. And, um, all my friends in school always wanted to come have playdates at my house. I bet we spent lots of time exploring the grounds. The home that I grew up on was situated one hill over from Biltmore House, so I did not grow up in the house, but in a smaller home on the property, and spent many hours building forts in the woods and playing in the creeks. I love the fact that Biltmore Estate to this day is still a working farm, and this was part of George Vanderbilt’s original vision that this would be a place of self-sufficiency, that he would try to grow as much food to supply the estate. And we continue that today. And I have these amazing memories of raising our orphaned calves and lambs. And actually, my first job here at Biltmore was opening up our farmyard, which provided our guests a really amazing opportunity to interact with the animals in the livestock and also learn about sustainable agriculture firsthand.

Aislyn: 130 years ago, George Vanderbilt and his landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted intentionally made Biltmore one of the earliest experiments in scientific forestry. But Chase’s commitments to sustainability and to Asheville were also shaped by his time working with another conservation hero, Jane Goodall.

Chase: She really helped me understand the importance of caring for nature and caring for things that are beautiful in this world, and that is something that I have brought back to my work here at Biltmore, and that we are stewards of this place, and it’s thinking about how we carry this tradition, this place, forward, and conserve it for generations to come. And I was really inspired to come back here because of the beauty of this place, but also the people here at Biltmore. I love the team of people that make Biltmore happen there. We have some of the nicest people in the world working here, and I wanted to be a part of it.

Aislyn: How big is the team? It must be massive.

Chase: We do have a big team. We have 1,700 employees that that make Biltmore work every day. And they are the people who deliver the incredible hospitality for which we have become known for. And they’re the heart and soul of this place. And we’re one of the largest employers in western North Carolina, and we take that very seriously. The bar was set very high with George and Edith Vanderbilt on how we treat people. We show up and try to treat people as we would want to be treated with kindness and respect.

Aislyn: After the break, we’ll meet the black community that built Asheville, including the Biltmore Estate. As Chase talked about, the way that George Vanderbilt treated his employees, I was reminded of the walking tour with Tebbé when we passed the historically black neighborhood of Eagle Street.

Tebbé: If you look at the history of Biltmore Estate, there were artisans from all over the world that were managing the crews. But for the most part, the crews came from Asheville. And when they were looking for people to work at the estate, they found the most willing employees were people that lived in the black neighborhood right here. And because they worked on the estate, they get paid the same amount of money as the people that were white. Okay, so if two guys working side by side got the same money, that was unheard of in America.

Aislyn: While equal pay was certainly something to be proud of, Asheville’s black communities faced the same institutional problems as the rest of the Jim Crow era South. Even as black laborers built many of the neighborhoods in Asheville, there were still streets right outside their homes that they were not allowed to cross.

DeWayne: What we notice is that in the historically African American neighborhoods, they were being torn down. They were coming in and we said, man, what can we do about it? We just seemed like, man, you know, we, we, we’re, we’re losing a lot.

Aislyn: This is DeWayne Barton. His family has lived in these mountains for more than 200 years. He runs a tour called Hood Huggers, the only company in Asheville that provides historical tours of the black neighborhoods and history of the city. But despite the tough subjects were about to discuss, Duane exudes positivity. He picks me up in a small orange school bus that’s been repurposed as a tour bus, with hood huggers painted in red, green, and white on the side. And our first stop is an open lot near the Burton Street neighborhood, which had a very different reputation back in DeWayne’s day.

DeWayne: This was the most dangerous neighborhood in the city. We would not be driving down here doing a tour around 2001. It was not a safe place to do that.

Aislyn: Standing in the lot is a performing artist named Virtuous, who has bright red curls beneath a black brimmed hat and a purple mic. Is it okay if I record you? Okay. All right. I’m gonna stand a little closer.

Virtuous: Camera friendly. Yeah. Thank you. This song is called humanity.

Yeah. Yeah. There is hope for humanity. Unity is in community. And so was you and I. So why can’t we work as a team? So much division, so much confusion. If they don’t see it the way that you do, then y’all can’t be friends. That’s crazy. We’re different and we see the world different to many cultures.

Aislyn: As we wave goodbye to virtuous, we climb back into the bus and DeWayne tells me that the idea for Hood Huggers came to him around 2015 while renovating a new community hub and business incubator. DeWayne and his coworkers noticed a trolley tour that would quickly pass them by.

DeWayne: And we used to watch the trolley zoom through the street and we said, man, I wonder, are they talking about black people in this neighborhood?

Aislyn: DeWayne talked to the tour operator who suggested he write a script for the tour to add, but DeWayne’s research uncovered a lot of history and a lot of frustration.

DeWayne: And I was like, man, I’m gonna just have to do this myself.

Aislyn: That self-sufficient attitude has carried him past tour operation and into local activism, including work on a local health and resiliency hub.

DeWayne: We’re in the process. We supposed to start this month, but we still in process of getting everything together with the permits and of course, fundraising. But, um, yeah, there were some people doing this work way before I came back here. So I’m just continuing the work.

Aislyn: DeWayne brings us to a stop at a brick building labeled Burton Street Community Center. I can see art sculptures in the distance, but before we go check those out, we stop inside the center to meet a longtime pillar of this community. The man with the mic. Thanks for having me

Clifford: Me. Well, good. I’m glad you’re here. Well, my name is Clifford Cotton, and I’m just here to kind of guide you through it. More or less. And because I am the grandson of the founder, E.W. Pearson, that founded this community back in 1912.

Aislyn: Will you tell the audience where we are?

Clifford: Oh, in Burton Street, Burton Street Elementary School, which is now the community center. Very cool. And this was actually where I went to elementary school.

Aislyn: Really?

Clifford: Oh, yes. Many, many years ago.

Aislyn: Just a couple of years ago.

Clifford: Yeah, yeah, just a couple of years ago. How about that? And it was the only school in the area for black kids.

Aislyn: Clifford has a ton of photos to show me. There’s one of his grandfather, who served in the Army’s 9th and 10th cavalry, all black units of service members that had previously included the Buffalo Soldiers. And there’s one of E.W. Pearson, who was a legendary figure in the city’s black history. He served with the Buffalo Soldiers in the Spanish-American war, then came back to Asheville as a civil rights leader and entrepreneur. In fact, his store was right across the street from where we’re standing.

Clifford: And he was teaching the people in the area to be more self-sufficient and to, you know, to grow their own food. And so they did. And he helped develop the community for growing their own products. And so he had an agricultural state fair. He found it.

Aislyn: Really.So he was really invested in feeding his community. It sounds like. Yeah.

Clifford: So well, he did that, but he said, well, we’re having such a successful crop. We need some recreation. So what he did, he founded the first semi-pro black baseball team in Asheville called the Royal Giants.

Aislyn: The Royal Giants. We’re looking at a photo of them.

Clifford: The first semi-pro black baseball team here in Asheville. Because, you know, after I like to say all work and no play, you know, the whole story. But that’s what they did there. You know.

Aislyn: Pearson was clearly one of those people DeWayne mentioned who started this kind of community work long ago. And it’s not hard to see the parallels. Clifford shows me a photo of his uncle, who became the first black disc jockey in Asheville, and a photo of his aunt, who was one of the first black deputy sheriffs in the city and was instrumental in saving the building that we’re in from being torn down. Photo after photo, document after document of people fully invested in their community. Back outside the center, DeWayne and I stroll through the area talking about all the improvements being made. Playgrounds. Solar panels. Information kiosks. Guide to black owned businesses. A community garden. An annual plant sale and a space for live music. But I think the best symbol of the work being done here might be the Peace Gardens Sculpture Park. We’re in this really neat like sculpture park.

I love it. Wow.

DeWayne: This is the only. The only reason this is here is because of the the war in Iraq in 2003. We started this and the war on drugs that was happening right here in the neighborhood. We used to go all the way to D.C. and play drums. Don’t go to war. Don’t go to war in Iraq. And as soon. And then we would come home and they. Pop pop pop pop pop. We diving on the floor. Yeah. We just drove 18 hours back to D.C. talking about war in the wars in our neighborhood. So we say, don’t go to Washington and protest when you don’t know your neighbor down the street. So that’s why we just created the Peace Gardens here. And this is like all the trash we was picking up in the neighborhood. The 40 ounce bottles. We made a peace sign out of that. The crack pipes was all trash. What is it? Just trash. It’s all historical places that has been torn down. So if they go tear down a historical place, we go get a door, the window, do whatever we can, and we bring it back here. And what we doing this year? We going through all the things that we have picked up historical places or things and we labeling it and we doing an inventory.

Aislyn:I love that you kind of took all of the, you know, negatives essentially and turn them into a peaceful positive. that’s really smart. And like that seems healing. In some ways.

Aislyn: Thematically, the sculptures focus on water quality violence and war, gentrification, youth incarceration, all issues which are or have been pressing for the black community here. But most of the work DeWayne is involved in is actually about celebration and connection, celebrating the black history that is often overlooked in the Appalachian region, and improving the connections and resources inside Asheville’s black community that began generations ago. What do you imagine when this is all done? What do you hope for this community?

DeWayne: I hope that the people, the historical residents that’s been here and they family’s been through redlining, urban renewal, the war on drugs, that they still have a place here and that their grandkids and children get to thrive in this gentrifying neighborhood. Yeah. It’s like, why should the people who had to deal with all the drama, all the restrictions, all the pain, then when the neighborhood flips and changes, they can’t afford to stay in. So the goal is to keep bodies of people in here, and they get to come in and we want to put more hot tubs in the hood.

Aislyn: That’s the long story of how Asheville became Asheville. It’s a place of self-sufficiency ringed by mountains, where people have both passed through and put down real roots. With this background in mind, you’ll find several more episodes about Asheville waiting in the feed.

Next up, why people have been coming to these mountains to feel better for 150 years.

I’m Aislyn Greene and this is Unpacked by Afar. We’ll see you in the mountains. Unpacked is a production of Afar Media. This episode was hosted by Aislyn Greene and produced by Nikki Galteland and Kendal Perkinson. Music from Chris Collin and Epidemic Sound. This podcast is part of the Airwave Podcast Network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to their other fine shows like Culture Kids and The Explorers podcast.