It’s hard to believe that only twelve months have passed since December 2023. As we look back on this past year, it is with even deeper gratitude for the community that carries us through even the toughest of times. As the old mountain saying goes, “come hell or high water,” the people of Asheville and Buncombe County have persevered and demonstrated resilience and strength. Helene eclipsed the Great Flood of 1916, and is now the most significant natural disaster in our region’s recorded history. The impacts of the disaster go far beyond the destruction of the natural and built environment. Individuals and communities across Western North Carolina have suffered immense losses that will forever shape our collective memory.
On that note, we’d like to start our year-end review with an important announcement. We are honored that the Friends of Buncombe County Special Collections have committed to provide financial support to “Come Hell or High Water,” a new community memory project. This multifaceted effort will create a pathway for community reflection, healing, and long-term development of community memory not afforded victims of past disasters. Our goals include launching a digital “memory bank” for community contributions of photos, stories, and more; collecting oral histories; and supporting historically-informed creative responses to Helene’s impact.
For more than a decade, the Friends of BCSC have provided supplementary funding and volunteer support to enable BCSC to go “above and beyond.” Now, with significant portions of BCSC’s public funding redirected toward recovery efforts, this support is more critical than ever.
Will you join the Friends of BCSC as a donor or volunteer to sustain our mission to make this impactful, community-driven work possible?
Join or renew your membership with the Friends of BCSC, and let us know if we can count on you as a volunteer by visiting tinyurl.com/bcsc-friends. You can make a donation at PayPal.me/friendsbcsc.
Looking back on 2024
This was also a year worth remembering for reasons beyond the flood.
BCSC staff members continued our intensive support for the Community Reparations Commission by drafting a historical narrative and compiling a Zotero library of resources for researching the history of racial inequality in Asheville and Buncombe County.
At Buncombe County Public Libraries’ annual Staff Development Day in the spring, we presented a panel discussion for all our library colleagues to learn more about the resources we offer. (Our team also took home a trivia trophy! Who’d’ve guessed we’d absolutely crush the library history round?)
We said goodbye to Library Assistant Catherine at the end of June, and returned to a staff size of four.
In August, we published Buncombe Origins: The Making of Asheville and Buncombe County, featuring contributions from community members sharing their reflections on our region’s complex legacies.
Through it all, of course, we continued the work of caring for the precious historical resources we hold in the public trust, and sharing them with others through events, outreach, and reference services.
Programs & services
More than 1,200 visitors attended the 32 public programs we held this year in Pack Memorial Library and at other library branches. 2024 was the second year of the popular Land of the Sky 101 Learning Circle, the second year of the cross-generational Retro Technology Discovery Day in partnership with Pack Memorial Library’s Youth Services department, and the third year that we welcomed an artist (Eric William Carroll) as part of our Carolina Record Shop artist fellowship program.
Equity and inclusion were themes of several programs, including a two-day symposium on Thomas Wolfe and race and an exhibition showcasing LGBTQ+ history.
And while we were saddened that disastrous weather dashed our dreams for the culminating event of the series, we were delighted to host an exhibition and several other events all about Moonshine and Motorsports!
Did you attend an event with us this year? Please consider letting us know your thoughts in this short, anonymous survey to help us plan for 2025. If you would like to offer us more feedback, please feel free to email us at packnc@buncombecounty.org.
In spite of our closure (along with all other Buncombe County libraries) from September 27 through October 20, we’ve welcomed 1,373 visitors to the reading room and answered 1,694 reference questions via email, phone, or in-person research in 2024 to date. Not surprisingly, a major focus of reference questions post-Helene centered around topics like past historic floods and Asheville’s water system, but throughout the year, patrons also explored topics ranging from streetcars to beauty pageants to orphanages and even mysterious bees from Buncombe County’s past.
Patrons from around the world use BCSC’s digital resources in the reading room and from home, too. As of December 6, researchers had performed 43,001 searches using BCSC’s ArchivEra database, with Thomas Wolfe leading as the most-searched term, followed by George Masa.
Our website, specialcollections.buncombecounty.org, was viewed 48,939 times by 23,595 unique visitors. Many of these were visitors to our blog, HeardTell. Meanwhile, on social media, 2,681 Instagram followers (@avlhistory) and 2,250 Facebook followers (@BuncombeCountySpecialCollections) have been enjoying learning about local trivia, anniversaries, and more.
BCSC staff also help patrons request and receive high-resolution copies of images from our collection, for purposes ranging from personal use to publication. In 2024 BCSC staff completed 77 individual image requests, sending a total of 1,369 high-resolution images to researchers. Just a few of the notable books, exhibitions, and other projects that our patrons created in 2024 using research and/or images from our collections include:
- Kevin Young, The Violent World of Broadus Miller: A Story of Murder, Lynch Mobs, and Judicial Punishment in the Carolinas (University of North Carolina Press, published April 2024)
- Marion Elliott Deerhake, Jane Pratt: North Carolina’s First Congresswoman (McFarland, published May 12, 2024)
- Paul Bonesteel and Janet McCue, George Masa: A Life Reimagined (Smokies Life, published September 10, 2024)
- Exhibition: The Photography of Andrea Clark: Remembering Asheville’s East End Community, Asheville Museum of History, on view September 21, 2024-February 2025 [first rotation of photographs]
- David Silver, The Farm at Black Mountain College (Atelier Editions and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, published December 17, 2024)
- Asheville Parks & Recreation, several new installments of the Park Views series exploring the history of the city’s public parks and community centers.
- Dale Wayne Slusser, several new installments of Architectural Tidbits for the Preservation Society of Asheville & Buncombe County
- Exhibition: A Stranger No More: George Masa and His Art, Mountain Heritage Center, opening January 13, 2025
We also continued to loan oral history backpacks and new personal archiving kits to help Buncombe County library card holders to start or continue projects of their own to preserve the history of their families, communities, or organizations—such as this collection of brief oral history recordings in celebration of Claxton Elementary School’s centennial anniversary, and interviews with environmental activists conducted by Andie Fox.
If BCSC resources and services have helped you this year, we’d love to hear about it. Let us know what you’ve been up to in the comments!
Collection highlights
BCSC received 59 new donations in 2024 and used materials funds to purchase other items of historical value, offering patrons countless new opportunities to engage with the past.
We kept up with the usual work of developing our reference collection, processing new archival collections, adding to existing collections, updating catalog descriptions, rehousing fragile items, and digitizing new material to make it easier for our researchers to discover and use the resources we preserve.
Reference collection
Our non-circulating reference collection includes rare, old publications as well as more recent scholarship that helps researchers understand and contextualize primary sources.
This year, we added more than 150 new books to the reference collection, including more than a dozen local cookbooks and titles like I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music by Peter La Chapelle and The History of the North Carolina Communist Party by Gregory S. Taylor. Patrons can’t check these out, but we track what gets used so that we can keep developing our collections in line with patron needs.
This year, the top five monographs “circulated” by use in the reading room were the Old Buncombe County Genealogical Society’s The Heritage of Old Buncombe County; A History of Buncombe County by F.A. Sondley; Barnardsville: A Picture Book by Sherry Fugett Byrd Maney; The Papers of Randolph Abbott Shotwell; and John Nolen’s 1922 Asheville City Plan. Serial titles topping the lists included the Annual Report of the Board of Public Charities of North Carolina, The Black Mountain Review published by Black Mountain College, and The Victorian, the yearbook of St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines.
Personal collections
The remnants of individual lives comprise a large portion of our collections: diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and more. While personal, they can reveal a great deal about the views of people living in a particular place and time, details about organizations or efforts the person was part of, or other details difficult to find through official recordkeeping.
We completed processing the Charles A. Webb Papers (MS432) donated by his descendants, covering details of his leadership of the Asheville Citizen-Times, advocacy for the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway, chairmanship of the drive to create the Asheville Colored Hospital, and letters to family and business associates.
We also received a donation of two very large (18 x 24 inch!) scrapbooks made by Walter Deal (MS450), documenting his time serving in WWII and opening a Buick dealership in Asheville, including photographs of the integrated workforce he employed well before racial integration occurred in Asheville.
A few other highlights of newly acquired items from personal collections include:
- Late 19th century journals of Captain Melvin Edmondson Carter and his wife Susannah M. Rawls (MS119)
- Three original manuscripts by local author Manly Wade Wellman (MS120)
- An inscribed copy of A Young Man’s Guide by William A. Alcott, a book of manners for young men first published in 1836 (MS030.001J)
- Photographs of the Waldrop family of Sandy Mush
- Several photographs of dating back to the 1800s depicting the family of Lulu and Frank Culver(n) and their mother Elsie Merwin (Murwin) Culver(n)
- A collection of fifty photographs by Asheville photographer Joe Longobardi
- A small collection of items relating to Asheville’s former ice hockey team, the Asheville Smoke (including a signed hockey stick!)
- Numerous small donations relating to Asheville’s NASCAR history
Records from small clubs, associations, and other groups sometimes blur the lines between personal papers on organization records. This year we received donations documenting the histories of groups including the Battery Park Residents Association, the Asheville chapter of the Philanthropic Educational Organization, the Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre, and others. (The hurricane put us a little behind on processing, so some of these aren’t yet available for patron use—but let us know if we need to bump any to the top of the queue for your research needs.)
Collections of personal papers and records of small organizations also dominated the reading room this year. The archival collections that were most frequently requested by patrons for research this year included the F.A. Sondley Collection (MS010), Horace Kephart and George Masa Correspondence (MS025), and Michael Harney Papers on WNCAP/NEPA (MS370)—not to mention hundreds of scrapbooks!
Local government records
Local government agencies are also among those who may donate their historic records to us for long-term access and preservation, when allowed under NC public records law. (Certain types of records have to be deposited to state archives instead, while yet others may be subject to privacy laws or record management policies that prevent them from being donated.)
Earlier this year, Dr. Mullendore of Buncombe County Health & Human Services brought us “a box that has been passed from Health Director to Health Director over the years.” And what a box of treasures it was! This collection (MS045) can now offer our patrons a comprehensive window into local public health history going back as far as the early 1900s. Browse digitized portions of the collection on the Internet Archive.
Records like these and other agencies’ (like the Asheville City Council Records, Asheville Fire Department Records, and Asheville-Buncombe Library Collection) help shed light on the evolution of public services over time.
Community collections
Did you know that BCPL branch libraries are in the local history game, too? For years, our staff members have assisted with community archiving initiatives like the West Asheville History Project (ongoing since the 1990s!), the North Asheville History Project, and the Fairview Community History Project, based out of the library branches of those regions of Buncombe County.
This year, thanks to West Asheville Library staff, we were able to accept a donation of scrapbooks documenting the history of the Harrison-Shaw Preaching Mission—and even digitize them!
The West Asheville History Project also sprang into motion with an incredibly well-attended storytelling event in May, featuring speakers Clifford W. Cotton II and Robert M. Randolph sharing family histories, followed by a walking tour led by Conda Painter of the West Asheville History Museum. (You can get involved by emailing us or submitting a West Asheville moment to the project website!)
Digital collections
BCSC continued to add to the 25,0000+ digitized and born-digital images in our collection. This includes making sure that materials we already hold in physical format can be accessed digitally by researchers around the world, and working with donors and creators to contribute digital files to our collections.
Following an increase in requests for past issues of Mountain Xpress, we began working with the NC Digital Heritage Center to make back digitized back issues of this local newspaper available through their North Carolina Newspapers digital platform. (More coming soon—in the meantime, you can still ask us for issues that haven’t been added yet!)
We also continued adding to our web archive collections, ensuring that websites can be preserved for future generations just like the physical materials we’ve traditionally collected. Our newest web archive collection gathers websites and articles about Hurricane Helene in WNC.
Thank you!
Thank you to all the patrons, friends and partners who have made 2024 an unforgettable year, in good times and bad. We look forward to working with you again in 2025!
Special thanks to the 828 Digital Archives for Historical Equity, Asheville Museum of History, Asheville Museum of Science, Asheville Radio Museum, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Black Mountain Library, Blue Ridge Community College, Blue Ridge Pride, Blue Ridge Public Radio, Bonesteel Films, Building Bridges of Asheville, Buncombe County Communications and Public Engagement (CAPE), Buncombe County Register of Deeds, Community Reparations Commission, Community Webs, East Asheville Library, Enka-Candler Library, Fairview Library, First Presbyterian Church, Friends of Buncombe County Special Collections, Leadership Asheville, Leicester Public Library, Mountain Gateway Museum, NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, NC Digital Heritage Center, Pack Memorial Library Youth Services, Preservation Society of Asheville and Buncombe County, Racial Justice Coalition, Society of Appalachian Historians, Southside United Neighborhood Association, Swannanoa Valley Museum & History Center, Thomas Wolfe Memorial, Trust Fund for Buncombe County Public Libraries, UNC Asheville, WNC LGBTQIA+ Archives, Weaverville Library, West Asheville Library, Western Regional Archives, and the YMI Cultural Center.
Wishing you a happy holiday season,
Carissa, Jenny, Kathy, and Katherine
Job well done!