With the recent donation of the Gallatin Roberts Collection, we received a magnificent story, as exciting and heart breaking as any Greek tragedy. Roberts was born under the shadow of a missing father and spent his entire life trying to be the trustworthy, upright man that he wished his father had been. At many of
A few weeks ago Dan Hill first made his presence known. His face smiled out of a 1922 photograph from the recently-donated Gallatin Roberts Collection. The men in the photograph were identified by their signatures below their feet. I knew Gallatin Roberts, the sober man second from right. He was Mayor of Asheville in 1922 and again during
The photographs of Exum Clement Stafford that we used in our online exhibit (see Last Week’s Post) came from several sources, and in some cases we did not have access to originals. We were scanning copies, and although the reproductions are remarkably good, we did not have access to any information that might have been written
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
“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,
One of the benefits of working in the North Carolina collection is the discovery of new imagery and information on Buncombe County and Western North Carolina. Recently I’ve been scanning a large group of images of students who were in the Adult Education Program in the mid-1920’s. But these aren’t typical students. These photographs document
I was recently talking with our North Carolina Room volunteer, Lynne Poirier-Wilson about different props and painted backdrops used by nineteenth century photographers. I had not paid much attention to them in the past, nor read about them. It is the kind of thing that has to be pointed out to you, and then a whole new
The growth of our collection depends on the generosity of donors like Gary Logan, who recently shared his extensive collection of family photographs. His great grandparents William Erwin Logan (1860-1916) and Rose Addie Deaver Logan (1865-1943), lived at 124 Logan Avenue in West Asheville, fondly called “The Big House” by the family. In the photograph above,
Asheville residents Lynne and Jim Wilson donated a gold mine of a notebook containing seventeen 8 x 10 prints of houses that had been recently constructed in Asheville, circa 1926 to 1930. All of the photographs were taken by the well-known Asheville photographer, Herbert W. Pelton. The original binder was an old black ringed notebook