As we approach the end of the year, join us in reflecting on how far we’ve come. 2025 has been a year of recovery for our entire region, and we’re grateful for all the visitors, researchers, donors, colleagues, and supporters that have joined us in the important work of preserving memory and connecting community.
First and foremost, special thanks are due to the Friends of BCSC, who provide funding and volunteer support for events, exhibitions, and special projects such as this past year’s community memory project focused on Helene, Come Hell or High Water.
You can join the Friends of BCSC as a donor or volunteer to help sustain BCSC’s mission of preserving and providing access to the social, cultural, and natural history of our region:
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.
By the numbers
As of December 17, 2025, BCSC:
- Held four exhibitions and 29 events attended by over 1,800 people throughout the year
- Welcomed 2,062 in-person visitors into the reading room for all kinds of exploration—from casual browsing to detailed research—who accessed 700+ different books and archival collections as part of their exploration.
- Hosted almost 600 students enrolled in K-12 or college programs as part of field trips or coordinated tours.
- Added 1,000+ items to the Come Hell or High Water digital memory bank, including community-contributed photographs, screenshots, poems, songs, visual art, and music; government records; and digitized records of past floods.
- Added 300+ new publications to our reference collection.
- Acquired 41 new gifts of unique archival resources which were added to our manuscript collections, photo collection, and architectural drawing collection.
- Added more than 100GB to web archives
- Created 6,500+ new scans from books, letters, and photos as part of digitization projects
- Digitized 50+recordings on aging and inaccessible audiovisual formats, including film reels, microcassettes, Betacam, VHS, and more
Come Hell or High Water
Come Hell or High Water was a key overarching initiative throughout the year. This was a direct response to our community’s need to heal through sharing stories of loss, grief, collaboration, and recovery.
At the core of Come Hell or High Water is a crowdsourced digital community archive, preserving and providing access to community-contributed photographs, screenshots, poems, songs, visual art, music and more from individuals as well as partner organizations also documenting Helene’s impact. Staff have also collected oral histories, web archives, and official records such as government funding requests and reports to form a complete picture of a region in recovery, plus digitized historical resources to offer context about past floods and riverfront development.
Since January, 1,033 items have been added to the site from at least 257 contributors, and 7,877 web users in the United States have visited the digital memory bank to contribute or browse. Contributed materials and oral histories have been used in documentaries and radio broadcasts, and have also informed recovery planning, reports, and research projects in areas such as perceived risk, disaster preparedness, emergency communications, and recovery needs. Submissions to the digital archive are still open—you can add an item here, leave us a short audio message, or learn more at the FAQ.
Nearly half of BCSC’s public programs in 2025 were organized with the goal of community healing, including three exhibitions hosted as part of the Carolina Record Shop, and some of the most popular events of the year: an off-site Helene recovery story sharing event; a book launch; a screening of art films about the Swannanoa River; and a screening of a documentary about the 1916 flood. BCSC staff and Friends of BCSC volunteers also partnered, presented, tabled, and participated in community events at the storm’s one-year mark.
Other programs
Another major accomplishment was closing out the Fairview Community History Project, a project long in the making. This community archives project was launched in 2018 but interrupted by COVID-19 and staff turnover. This year, BCSC and Fairview Library staff worked together to finalize, print, and bind oral history transcripts; as well as to host a major event at the Fairview Library, Celebrate Fairview! More than 120 attendees eagerly packed into the Fairview Library to share memories, listen to oral histories, enjoy a meal together, honor Annie Ager by dedicating the community room to her, and recognize those who worked on the community history project.
In the fall, BCSC was proud to collaborate with Explore Asheville and numerous other organizations on The Asheville Sessions: Celebrating 100 Years of Americana & Appalachia. As part of this city-wide celebration, BCSC organized and presented an exhibition about Asheville in the 1920s that spanned upper and lower levels of Pack Memorial Library, with a special section in the BCSC reading room focusing on the historic Asheville Sessions recordings at the George Vanderbilt Hotel in 1925.
In 2025 we also reprised the popular Land of the Sky 101 Learning Circle, as well as the Retro Technology Discovery Day for all ages, both for the third year running.
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@buncombenc.gov.
Research & reference services
Whether in person, by email, or over the phone, BCSC patrons are nothing if not curious! We logged more than 1,600 reference questions this year, helping researchers find answers through digital resources, books, ad archival collections.
Topics of particular interest this year were past floods, the history of the area now known as the River Arts District, folklore, cookbooks/food history, hospitals/medical history, and photographers (especially George Masa).
Monographs accessed most frequently were the usual suspects: F. A. Sondley’s A History of Buncombe County (1930) and the Old Buncombe County Genealogical Society’s The Heritage of Old Buncombe County (1981). The top serials consulted in 2025 were Paw Prints (Asheville High School annual, 1970-2009), Asheville, North Carolina: The Land of the Sky (Asheville Board of Trade publication, 1905-1930), and The North Carolina Year Book (government and business directory, 1901-1941).
Patrons viewed hundreds of boxes, folders, and items from archival collections, too, most frequently requesting access to the Ephemera Collection (MS028), Quality Forward/Asheville GreenWorks Records (MS252), Horace Kephart and George Masa Papers (MS025), Buncombe County Schools Records (MS247), and Henry Family Papers (MS020).
Patrons also use BCSC resources virtually from all over the world. Platforms that provide public access to BCSC’s digital resources include ArchivEra, the Internet Archive, DigitalNC, Newspapers.com, Archive-It (for web archives), and now Omeka (Come Hell or High Water).
Our primary platform, ArchivEra, serves as both a catalog for describing archival materials not represented in the library’s OPAC as well as a portal for viewing and downloading access copies of digital resources and digitized surrogates. Patrons accessed this database 37,492 times in 2025, and top searches by keyword were Thomas Wolfe, Allen High School, George Masa, McCormick Field, and Grove Park Inn.
Our website, specialcollections.buncombenc.gov, was viewed (as of December 17) 62,730 times by 23,857 unique visitors, while on social media, 3,208 Instagram followers (@avlhistory) and 2,347 Facebook followers (@BuncombeCountySpecialCollections) have enjoyed seeing collection highlights, program reminders, and local history tidbits.
Patron use of BCSC resources continues to range widely. Patrons requested images for personal use, such as genealogical research and creative inspiration. As people rebuilt and renovated storm-damaged homes and businesses, several requested historic photos which they planned to display to pay homage to their buildings’ past lives. Journalists and scholars used materials from BCSC inform and illustrate research that contributes to better understanding and appreciation of our region. Here are a few of the notable books, exhibitions, and other projects that our patrons created this year using research, images, or loans from our collections:
Books and scholarly publications
- Michael Holcombe, The Story of Asheville’s Water: Before and Beyond Hurricane Helene.
- Ren Davis and Helen Davis, Land of Everlasting Hills : George Masa, Jim Thompson, and the Photographs That Helped Save the Great Smoky Mountains and Blaze the Appalachian Trail.
- Nancy P. East, Historic Hikes in Western North Carolina.
- Paul Hartis, Mr. & Mrs. Parade: The History of Cline’s Floats of Catawba County.
- David O. Freedman, “Asheville, North Carolina: The Origin of the American Tuberculosis Sanitarium Movement,” Annals of Internal Medicine.
You might have also run into BCSC loans, images, or research in these exhibitions:
- The Photography of Andrea Clark: Remembering Asheville’s East End Community, Asheville Museum of History (Part I: September 21, 2024 – February 8, 2025; Part II: February 12, 2025 – May 31, 2025).
- Making Our Voices Heard: North Carolinians Fighting for Civil Rights, traveling exhibition by America 250 NC, NC Historic Sites and the NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
- Incarcerated Labor on the Western North Carolina Railroad, MosaicNC.
- Exhibition panels at Biltmore Industries Homespun Museum
- Two exhibitions (Our Changing World and exhibit panels “Asheville’s Legacy of Science Learning” and “Our Place at Pack”) at the Asheville Museum of Science
- Look Homeward, Angel: Letterio Calapai’s Wood Engravings of the Asheville Inspired Novel, Asheville Art Museum (December 10, 2025 – February 22, 2026)
Plus, keep an eye out for these documentaries, coming soon:
- Black and Jewish in America: An Interwoven History with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., McGee Media and Inkwell Media, premiering February 2026
- A Life Reimagined: The George Masa Story, Bonesteel Films, premiering May 2026
- Crime and Punishment in America, Skiff Mountain Films, premiering 2026
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
Our climate-controlled reading room and archival storage space are home to hundreds of thousands resources—books, photographs, maps, personal papers, architectural drawings, government records, organizational archives, scrapbooks, you name it—and the collection grows each year. A few highlights of new resources (not counting material collected as part of Come Hell or High Water) are:
- Forty-seven letters between Japanese photographer George Masa and Fred Loring Seely, added to the George Masa papers in our Masa/Kephart collection (MS025.001K).
- The records of the West Asheville Garden Stroll (MS035).
- Four boxes of administrative records, photographs, scrapbooks, and drawings, for the French Broad River Garden Club Foundation dating from the clubs founding in 1927 to the present (MS459).
- Ten portraits of an African American family who lived in a historically Black community for several generations.
- Thirty architectural drawings for Trinity Episcopal Church dating between 1911 and 2023.
- Nine photographic prints by Isaac King, taken in the weeks following Helene and printed from slides processed in the floodwaters.
- A 1900 photo scrapbook that documents Asheville and the surrounding region, including residents of Allanstand and Mars Hill.
- A rare cyanotype of a total solar eclipse as witnessed from Mars Hill
- An 8mm film of a road trip in the 1930s or 1940s showing a group of upper class men on their travels between North Carolina and Florida
- 27 CDs and 43 vinyl records that document our region’s musical legacies, including contemporary recordings such as The Resonance Sessions (2025)
- 300+ new books added to the reference collection, ranging from rare, out-of-print resources to recent scholarship about WNC.
Speaking of books, BCSC also began a formal appraisal process to help us better understand and protect the valuable resources we hold in the public trust. This year, we completed a survey of rare books and fine art in the collection—and highlighted some of these “hidden treasures” in a Rare Books Bash (which doubled as a birthday party for the oldest book in our collection, a 1625 KJV Bible!)
Thank you!
BCSC’s work this year, especially Come Hell or High Water, would not have been possible without the help of project coordinator Emily Cadmus, interns Alison Farley (Spring 2025) and Jonah Turner (Fall 2025), and the following Friends of BCSC board members and volunteers:
Catherine Amos, Dee Dee Allan, Daniel Galewsky, Polly Rolman, Ann McCutchan, Kate Sepp, Tori Rigsby, Bill Green, Bonnie Antosh, Caitrin Robinson, Fiora Mecale, Gretchen LeMaistre, Jed Grossman, Kellie Monacell, Lindsey Grossman, Maggie McMains, Mary Greene, Mike Holcombe, Pete Schreiner, Susan Kraft, Suzanne Colwell, Thomas Bennett, and Will Bahr.
Special thanks to the 828 Digital Archives for Historical Equity, Asheville Art Museum, Asheville Museum of History, Asheville Museum of Science, Asheville Radio Museum, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Blue Ridge Community College, Blue Ridge Pride, Blue Ridge Public Radio, Bonesteel Films, Buncombe County Communications and Public Engagement (CAPE), Buncombe County Register of Deeds, Community Reparations Commission, Community Webs, Fairview Library, First Presbyterian Church, Friends of BCSC, Leadership Asheville, Mountain Gateway Museum, NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, NC Digital Heritage Center, Preservation Society of Asheville and Buncombe County, Racial Justice Coalition, Southside United Neighborhood Association, Swannanoa Valley Museum & History Center, Thomas Wolfe Memorial, UNC Asheville, Warren Wilson College, West Asheville Library, Western Regional Archives, WNC LGBTQIA+ Archive, and the YMI Cultural Center.
You, dear reader, are deeply important to this work. We look forward to hearing from you, working with you, and helping you discover new information about this wonderful region we call home in the coming year.
Sincerely,
Kathy, Jenny, Katherine, and Carissa
