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…
Read moreMid-Course Correction: Ella Goes to (Mid-Course) Asheville, 1907
A previous post explored Ella Austin’s and Asbury Whisnant’s lives during the post-Civil War years–before they both took jobs at the State Hospital at Morganton around 1894. Another focused on the…
Read moreElla, Asbury and the State Hospital at Morganton: From Social and Institutional to Personal History
Every day of the year somebody’s brain reels. Splendid as is our civilization, insanity, and intemperance, its foremost proximate cause, are its dark shadows which follow its march with ever-deepening…
Read moreThe Cruel War and Its Aftermath: Life Down the Mountain for Asbury and Ella, 1869-1894
Asbury Whisnant and Ella Austin were not born in Asheville. They arrived as fully-formed adults: he came in 1900 when he was twenty-eight, and she came in 1907 when she was…
Read moreThe End of the (Wagon) Road in North Carolina: The Whisnants and Austins in the Down-Mountain Counties, 1760-1865
My previous post took the Visinands/Whisnants from Germany to Lancaster County PA, where they lived for (it seems) about thirty years before loading their possessions and progeny into Conestoga wagons and taking…
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