Wednesday, February 26th, 6:00 until 7:30 PM Pack Library Lord Auditorium Rich Mathews, historian and researcher for Mathews Architecture, will present a slide presentation about the Southside Neighborhood in Asheville Here Rich gives us a preview of his talk. Join us on Wednesday night for MORE! I’m a preservationist. I love old buildings and historic neighborhoods.
Edward W. Pearson, Sr. was one of the most energetic and creative forces for positive change that Asheville has ever known. From Pearson’s arrival in Asheville in 1906, until his death in 1946, he worked tirelessly to improve the fortunes and the quality of life of his family and his community. Facing many barriers to
I joined the staff at Pack Memorial Library in 1990 when I took the position of Special Collections Librarian. Lewis Buck was my closest associate in the North Carolina section. As I studied to get up to speed on Asheville history, he steered me toward the brief histories of Asheville and Buncombe County in Cabins
The first time that I revisioned a different Asheville, one with horses, was when I read Pauline Moore’s diary she wrote in 1916 at the age of 19. In May, Pauline wrote, “Frank Netherland & I went for a long horse back ride this afternoon. Up by Beaumont Lodge by the Battle Bungalow through Kenilworth
“Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.” Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel Recently a man renovating a house on East Chestnut Street found a box of letters and pictures,
The Great Depression was in full swing in 1934. Looking back at people’s wildly varying reactions to such adversity elicits a mixed bag of emotions. Great sadness for the suffering. Amazement at the triumph of human spirit. Bafflement at seemingly futile (but perhaps poetic) gestures of hope. Take, for example, this poor family passing through Pack Square on a
The staff of the NC Room offers you “best wishes for the season” in the words of Asheville personality Ignatius Watsworth Brock (1866-1950), nationally known photographer and artist. Old Earth its cycles still repeating Brings us Christmas every year Now to you we send a greeting For the festive season here With best wishes for
Yutaka Minakuchi: A Story in a Name
One of the delights of cataloguing incoming materials in the NC Room is that the smallest detail can lead down a rabbit hole into worlds of stories. Recently, while working with papers of Albert Heath Carrier, partner of the Smith & Carrier architectural firm that designed many of Asheville’s historic buildings, I discovered an amazing