Quick Take on the Early Years: Incorporation, De-/Re-incorporation, Annexation, and Mini-Boom, 1889-1925 When West Asheville–already on the way toward development and modernization–was incorporated on February 9, 1889, the language of…
Read moreThe Several Lives of West Asheville, Part II: Edwin G. Carrier Before West Asheville
The Story So Far Edwin Carrier was born in 1839, so he was in his late forties when he arrived in Western North Carolina (probably in 1885). Early discussions of…
Read moreThe Several Lives of West Asheville, Part I: Sulphur Springs as Proto-Land of the Sky, 1827-1861
This post arose initially from my effort to understand the West Asheville of the early 1920s, when both my Whisnant and Rudisill grandparents moved there–the Whisnants from fifteen years in…
Read moreCotton Mill Colic vs. the Land of the Sky: From Gastonia to Asheville
The nearly two dozen posts I have published so far have focused on the Whisnant family, the first of whom entered the North Carolina Piedmont in the 1750s. My Whisnant grandparents,…
Read moreFamily Challenges in the ‘Teens: A Strike, a Flood, and an Epidemic
This post focuses on the Asheville Street Railway Strike of 1913; the great Asheville flood of 1916; and the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920, in which my father nearly died.
Read moreA Document Answers Some Questions (and Raises New Ones)
In writing this blog so far, I have consulted and presented many kinds of documents: photographs, census records, newspaper articles and advertisements, printed catalogs, maps, postcards, government reports–whatever I have been able…
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