In case you have ever (or never) pondered how much cross-cultural tolerance there may have been in Asheville in 1929, ponder this Sunday Citizen item from June 9, p. 18. OK, well, the good Reverend was situated a few miles south at Fletcher’s Calvary Episcopal Church (funded and founded in the 1850s by wealthy Lowcountry slave-owning rice planters when Fletcher was a northern extension of Flat Rock, with its dozens of faux Charleston mansions).
Just coincidentally, during other work Anne and I have recently done (a historical study of the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site at Flat Rock), we learned that Calvary Episcopal was also the site of an exhibit called a “grand outdoor Westminster Abbey of the South,” conceived of four years earlier (and designed by) none other than the Rev. McClellan as a memorial to a score or so of the “great ideas and great idealists” (his term)of the South. The installation is still there, if any WNC residents want to take a short drive:
Photo by David E. Whisnant, Aug. 18, 2018.
The first to be put in place (a memorial bronze tablet on a granite boulder) honored none other than Jefferson Davis, followed by a roster of UDC favorites: Gen. Robert E. Lee, minstrel composer/performer Dan Emmett, Stephen Foster, Joel Chandler Harris, poet laureate of the Confederacy Henry Timrod, North Carolina’s slave-owning Civil War governor Zebulon B. Vance, Appalachian fabulist John Fox, Jr., Joel Chandler (“Uncle Remus”) Harris, and others.
Texts for all of the monuments may be found here.
Hello, David! Here’s an update on the “Westminster Abbey of the South” installation at Calvary Episcopal Church. I was out there just recently taking photos of the church and its cemetery for my new business, “Explore Henderson County.” I was very surprised to find the whole “abbey” gone – the plaques and the granite plinths. To all appearances it happened within the past year, because the ground has not grown new grass yet, but I had not heard anything about this in the local papers. There was also a long excavation beside the monument area, but I have no idea if that was related.
Interestingly, the Robert E. Lee / Dixie Highway plaque was also missing, but its unmarked stone still stands next to Hwy. 25. It was a separate installation, created by the UDC in 1926. There were seven identical plaques along the route of the Buncombe Turnpike / Dixie Highway / U.S. 25 between the Tennessee state line and the South Carolina state line. The one at the SC line disappeared a few years ago, the one in downtown Marshall was stolen last year (if I recall correctly), and Asheville removed the one on Pack Square when the Vance monument was removed. Hendersonville’s is still there, but I don’t know about the other two, having not been to the Hot Springs area in quite a few years – there is one in the town, and another at the Unicoi Co line.
Very interesting article about Islam and the Koran! It would be great to have the audio recording of that program to hear the topic was presented in that era. That recording is likely long gone.