Rob Neufeld

Visiting Our Past

Here are some colorful stories from North Asheville in days gone by.

The horse-riding preacher of Grace

When Dr. Ernest Smith, a medical missionary in the Belgian Congo, returned home to Asheville in 1934, he told an audience about what had gotten him started on his career. It was a single act by Reverend Billy Rice, the Grace Episcopal Church pastor who rode his horse over the countryside visiting remote churches.

“My father was a drayman,” Smith prefaced his slide show, “and had a reputation of being mean to horses.” Frank Roberson, Rice’s grandson, had been at the talk, and recalls Smith’s words.

“One day,” Smith went on, “I was hauling a load of cottonseed up Culvern Hill (the rise that begins at Ingles on Beaverdam Road). I passed Billy Rice coming down the hill just as I was starting to despair that the horses weren’t going to make it. Rather than beat the horses (as his father had), I stopped to give them a little rest. I turned around to see how far we’d gotten and there was Billy Rice in the mud. He’d gotten off his horse and was pushing against the back of the wagon. That was what changed my way of thinking and led me to become a missionary.”

Reverend Billy, as he was called, was not always successful in getting animals or humans on the right path. Once, driving his buggy from Azalea to his farm on Bull Creek, he passed a mule that had been frightened into a ditch by a truck. The mule was wobbling his ears and turning his head back toward the hay-loaded wagon, which, teetering atop the ditch, looked too big to move.

Billy stopped and urged the mule with gentle gestures and ecclesiastical words, but to no effect. A farmer came by and promised he could move the mule. He grabbed a fallen limb and beat the animal on the side of the head while pelting him with obscene insults. The mule soon preferred the open road and its burden-pulling option.

When Billy Rice died in 1929, the “Asheville News” noted that “it is said by many that he has married and buried more people than anyone else in Western North Carolina.” All churches, white and black, accepted him. Skeptical Baptists were impressed by his laying down of the prayer book and praying from the heart at their funerals. His children thought of him as a stern father who was transformed when he entered the pulpit.

Billy’s father, John Longmire Rice, had been a powerful example to him. The superintendent of the Piney Grove Presbyterian Church Sunday School, he had declined to bear arms when the Civil War started. Instead, he enlisted with Col. William Thomas’ Cherokee Cavalry, taking care of the horses of the men who guarded the mountain passes. In 1864, John Rice returned from East Tennessee, the site of unprecedented food shortages, suffering from black tongue, a symptom of malnutrition, and died.

Billy was eighteen when his father died. A few years later he got the call to preach and was embraced as a student of the Episcopal Bishop, who had resided in a house on what is now Biltmore Estate property.

Legendary strongman

Beaverdam’s rural and legendary character continued well into the 20th century. The two aspects go together. Just read Fred Chappell’s novel, “Brighten the Corner Where You Are,” which takes place in Haywood County. Frank Roberson of Beaverdam told me about a local strong man. “I saw a demonstration of Fayte Burnette’s strength once,” Roberson said, speaking of a popular pre-World War II local character. Burnette had come upon workers trying to fix a water line on property that Roberson’s father-in-law, Elmer Carter, was developing into Kimberly Woods. Cows had tramped on the pipe and broken it.

“What are you fellows trying to do?” Fayte called. “We’re trying to get this water line together,” a worker answered, exasperated.

Burnette knelt in the ditch, grabbed the two parts of the pipe, pulled them until the ends met, and said, “Just put your wrench on that.” Burnette captured the attention of a professional strongman, John Drake.

Drake, Southern middleweight wrestling champion and Depot Street-Patton Avenue streetcar motorman, was native to the area and knew Burnette. Drake’s national reputation had included throwing the “Masked Marvel” in 1911. In 1936 during a record snow fall, Fayte once again demonstrated his prowess. He delivered a 100-pound sack of feed to a farmer who lived on Peach Knob near the Blue Ridge Parkway. He carried the weight on his shoulder.

Roberson added to the legend. “Fayte and his brother had been recruited by the University of Kentucky to play on their football team,” he said. “The university had to rescind their scholarships and send them home because they dang near crippled their teammates.”

Drake felt he had to go test himself against Fayte. He traveled to Mountain Meadows Inn, the rustic boarding house on Peach Knob at which Burnette acted as caretaker. “Do you want to wrestle me?” Drake asked.

“Whatever you want to do,” said Burnette. The two went into the barn.

“Now, how do you play this game?” Burnette queried.

The rest of the story

Fayte’s walk through the snow storm in 1936 from the A&P on Merrimon Avenue measured four miles. While buying feed for his milk cow, he also purchased a can of sardines and a package of soda crackers as snacks. He would save a nickel by drinking from an ever-flowing spring he’d pass at the White family house at the end of North Griffing Boulevard.

With the sack on his shoulder, Burnette trudged up woodland paths for two hours, avoiding drifts and snow-laden branches. The cold would have reminded him of Drake, whose feet, he knew, had had to be amputated because of the freezing they had endured over the years on the open car line. A few years later, Drake would be depending on his upper body strength to do carpentry and farm chores without prosthetics at his place on Magnolia Avenue in Asheville.

Coming to the end of his trek, Burnette felt thankful for his powers of endurance, as did his pampered cow. The men at the A&P kept talking about him. Local fox hunters mentioned how Fayte always stopped by their ridge-top campsites wearing only shirt sleeves. Charles A. Lord, proprietor of the drugstore next door, recalled how Fayte, emerging from a car accident once, had had him sew up a gash on his head without bothering to wait for a doctor.

In today’s age of superheroes and vice cops, stories of super human regular folks are rare.

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,” at thereadonwnc.ning.com. Contact him at RNeufeld@charter.net or 505-1973; @wnc_chronicler.