My initial intention for this post (one in a series on Enka) was to investigate the presence of Black workers at the Dutch-owned American Enka plant in Buncombe County’s Hominy…
Read more“The Best and Most Prosperous City”: American Enka and the Imagined Transformation of Asheville
NOTE TO READERS: This is the second in a series of posts on the coming of the American Enka Corporation plant to Buncombe County’s Hominy Valley in 1928, and its…
Read moreEvery Marriage Is Two Marriages: John Whisnant and Mary Neal Rudisill Whisnant’s Early Years Together, 1934-1940
Every marriage is two marriages: his and hers. Jessie Bernard, The Future of Marriage (1973)((See also Jessie Bernard.)) After a short train ride north from Asheville in late August 1934,…
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 moreRetrospective I: A Primer on the Sad Truths of Slavery in Asheville, Buncombe County and Western North Carolina
The Consensus Myth: “No Slaves or Slaveholders in the Mountains” John Preston Arthur’s popular 1914 history put the matter of slaves and slaveholders in the mountains succinctly and unambiguously::…
Read moreHow’s That Again?: Some New Angles on Asheville and Western North Carolina History
Perennial Problems with “Land of the Sky” History Since it first appeared in 1875, the “Land of the Sky” descriptor for Asheville has been perennially present, enticing and marketable.…
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