Most people are familiar with, and bemoan, the decision our county forefathers made to not go with Douglas Ellington’s proposed twin designs for the Asheville City Hall and the Buncombe County Courthouse. But did you know about Ellington’s plan for a civic auditorium? Douglas Ellington introduced Art Deco architecture to Asheville in the 1920s, starting with
There is a prominent sign made of an oak plank with brass letters on one of the columns on the main floor of Pack Memorial Library. The sign reads “Sondley Reference Library.” It is one of the few remaining visible markers of the library’s long association with the legacy of one of Asheville’s most noteworthy
THE ELEGANCE OF ASHEVILLE’S ARCHITECTURE RENDERED ON NOTE CARDS BY ARTIST MARGARET DAHM The Friends of the North Carolina Room are pleased to provide the solution to all of your correspondence needs. Yes, you can stop postponing to write those long overdue thank you notes because you “don’t have a card”. Drop by the North Carolina Room and purchase a pack
A year ago last July, when the staff in the North Carolina Room first started the blog HeardTell, we posted about a new collection donated to us by Asheville residents Lynne and Jim Wilson. The collection is a gold mine containing seventeen 8 x 10 prints of houses that had been recently constructed in Asheville,
Last week’s post on Asheville photographer James M. McCanless made mention of James’s brother, Samuel Alonzo McCanless, winning a marble angel from William O. Wolfe in a poker game. That’s a story unto itself. Samuel, also a photographer, was born in 1859 in McDowell County and died March 6, 1923. The two brothers are listed together
It is hard to let unanswered questions go for very long. As an update to last week’s post “North Carolina Room and a Recent Donation Gets Media Coverage,” the obvious question facing all of us was “Who was the photographer?” A school librarian from Albany, New York, Lucy Menard, had sent us a 1904 photo album
The story goes like this: The North Carolina Room’s very own Friends of the North Carolina Room board member, Jon Elliston, published an article Thursday January 15th on Carolina Public Press about a 1904 photograph album that was sent to the NC Room by a woman in Albany, New York. She had found the album in a box of Albany
Asheville once had a flourishing system of parochial primary and secondary schools. Catholic schools reached their peak in both number of schools and enrollment in the 1950’s and 1960’s and then went into a quick retreat in the 1970’s. Declines in religious vocations greatly reduced the availability of nuns and priests to staff the schools
LIBRARY AWARDED FEDERAL GRANT The Buncombe County Public Library’s North Carolina Room has been awarded a $66,750 grant to be used for scanning the Six Associate’s Architectural Drawings Collection. This will allow us to better serve patrons of the library and the community at large. LSTA funds awarded by the State Library of North Carolina are