Rob Neufeld

Visiting Our Past

Join me on a walk through Asheville in this beautiful spring day in 1916. You will be impressed by how clean the streets are. It wasn’t that way 20 years earlier, when Patton Ave. got muddy in wet weather, horses had to be swept after; and women feared going downtown because their long skirts picked up dust.

But then the streetcars came, mostly displacing the horses. Women started driving automobiles. Advertisers targeted the ladies, printing pictures of them with scarves flying behind steering wheels.

The city started picking up garbage, to be incinerated; and blasting the paved streets with high pressure hoses. There’s a new law against spitting!

Watch out! The traffic.

Everyone seems giddy with prosperity these days. You wouldn’t know there’s a war going on in Europe, or maybe you would.

Kids go joyriding — at night they open their mufflers and honk their horns, coming from parties. Delivery boys on bicycles go 25 miles per hour, weaving in and out.

Oh, you seem to be enjoying yourself. OK, maybe you’re heading to the Battery Park Hotel tonight for a party of your own. Drink some whiskey.

Yeah, it’s dry here, been so since 1908, but that doesn’t stop these fancy places from getting liquor from across state lines. Or anyone from finding a bootlegger.

I’ll tell you some stories about that sometime, if you want to keep me on. Well, here’s one story you’ll appreciate.

Mrs. Vanderbilt — you know of the Vanderbilts, of course — well, she was going to take a motor trip in her touring car — she had a white 1913 Stevens-Duryea “C-Six” seven-passenger car. She was going with Cornelia to California, and people threw a send-off party for them.

They made the mistake of using ice from the dairy in the mint juleps, and the ice had ice cream salt in it, and the liquor was spoiled. An emergency call went out to a bootlegger. I don’t know who had the connection, but it wasn’t too hard.

As I said, everyone was partying.

I heard a fellow over at the Swannanoa-Berkeley the other day, saying to his friend, “I have lost $2,500 in the last three nights — every dollar I have made in the last year in my law practice. I promised my mother on her death-bed that I would not gamble. I promised Miriam, my girl, I would not drink. And the more I drink, the more reproachful my conscience becomes.”

Where are you staying — at the Langren? That’s brand new, built fireproof. There were a lot of fires here last year, mostly from chimney sparks.

I’ll tell you something, they say Asheville is a haven for people with lung ailments, but it isn’t as pretty a picture as you’d think. You don’t see it right now, but in the winter, smoke is pouring out the chimneys — coal smoke.

The day after a big snow, and you’ve got a gray-capped cityscape.

Thomas Wadley Raoul — he built the Manor — headed up a smoke committee and, just a few months ago, hired an engineer to come up with a way to make furnaces smokeless.

You want clean air, go to the mountains.

The boardinghouses in the city will put you out on the street if they think you carry germs, and the city will come along and disinfect.

I might get you to meet Mr. Raoul. He and Vance Brown and a Mr. Patterson have just gotten a new building put up for the Asheville Club at Broadway and Walnut. Charlton Millard’s place — he has shops on the street level, and the club has the top two floors.

It’s not quite what your guy had planned. Your guy — Gay Green, he built the hotel you’re staying in. He also proposed to put up a Shangri-La for the Asheville Club on College Street — 29 bedrooms, a swimming pool, three private dining rooms, with his furniture store on the main level. Didn’t fly.

Hey, let’s grab a paper and a cigar and I’ll tell you more, as we watch the traffic go by. You need another pad to write your notes in?

No? Don’t stand by the Sondley Building. That’s where O. Henry couldn’t write and kept crumbling up his pages in 1909.

I’ve got lots of stories. Here’s the main thing. Asheville is booming, construction has tripled in five years.

Mr. Edwin Wiley Grove has come along, and now no more livestock will legally roam free within city limits.

Livestock? Dogs! Asheville’s got itself a dog catcher and he’ll nab your dog if he’s not muzzled. He nabbed Buster, and nearly got mobbed by people because Buster’s the city’s official rat catcher. So now Buster has dispensation from the muzzle law. That’s how things work, if you have connections.

Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature and manages the WNC book and heritage website The Read on WNC. Contact him at RNeufeld@charter.net or 505-1973.

SOURCES

The Vanderbilt story was told to me by Jane Bingham in 2000. The story about the gambler comes from “Azure-Lure: A Romance of the Mountains” by Harvey Holleman (1924). Streetcar information came in part from “Trolleys in the Land of the Sky” by David Bailey et al. Information about other items comes from news articles of the time, reports and directories.