Visiting Our Past: Untold stories of Asheville's Riverside Park

The Citizen-Times

A reader wanted to know more about Riverside Park, Asheville’s premiere popular entertainment place from 1902 to 1916.

It was mentioned in last week’s “Portrait of the Past,” which featured a mutoscope — a movie-viewing machine — placed in the park in 1903.

“Where exactly was Riverside Park?” the reader asked. “How large was it? Had there been a predecessor at the site?”

Before the flood

Riverside Park was at the height of its glory at its Labor Day celebration in 1913, three years before the 1916 flood wiped the park away.

Every business and office closed down for the day. Thousands of people streamed to the park, the Asheville Citizen reported.

There was music, thanks to the Power and Light Company. At various stations, men sold rubber balls and “walking canes with Labor Day pennants attached.”

Families spread picnics “in the many shaded nooks in and about the park (and) all during the afternoon the lake was filled with rowboats and other craft, while several swimmers ventured into the water to cool off.”

More: Portrait of the Past: Movie machines in Asheville's Riverside Park, 1902

More: Visiting Our Past: When train brakes failed on Saluda railroad line, wrecks were inevitable

More: Visiting Our Past: The romance of the railroad touched Asheville

A baby contest paraded 45 infants under the eyes of seven judges and an audience.

“Unlike baby shows of the old style, at which winners are chosen through the popularity of the parents,” the newspaper noted, “yesterday’s show was conducted along scientific lines.”

“The children were considered as to weight, appearance, size and condition of their eyes,” the article related. “Ernest T. Ingle, the son of Mr. and Mrs. T.P. Ingle, of South Grove Street, was awarded the blue ribbon.”

Taulby P. Ingle, a plumber for J.R. Ritch & Co., was married to Ethel. They are buried in Dix Creek, Leicester, as is their son, Ernest, a World War II veteran.

At Labor Day in 1913, Ernest was six months old, and his parents, in their early 20s, had dressed him up for a promenade.

Before the Tourists

Meanwhile, down on the baseball diamond, where the Asheville Red Birds played their Western North Carolina League games, the painter’s union prepared to face the carpenter’s craft in a workers’ championship match.

Throughout the region, baseball had become a passion, generating industrial and group leagues. In 1913, the Mountaineers, a North Carolina League team, came to Oates Park.

The Mountaineers succeeded the Moonshiners, who had played in the Appalachian League, and changed their name to the Tourists in 1915.

Their home park, Oates, was about where LabCorp now sits on McDowell Street, according to Bijan C. Bayne’s chapter in “Baseball in the Carolinas.” The Asheville Royal Giants, an African-American team, started playing there in 1916, while sometimes playing at Pearson Park in West Asheville.

“The first game at Oates Park in 1913 was an exhibition between the Mountaineers and the Philadelphia Athletics managed by Connie Mack,” baseball-reference.com states, citing Bill Ballew’s “A History of Baseball in Asheville.” “Shortly thereafter, Ty Cobb organized a group of players and also played against the Mountaineers.”

Every player on the 1913 Mountaineers roster on baseball-reference’s website is marked with a question mark regarding the rest of their career — except for Walter Barbare, the team’s third baseman, who was in the second year of his 14-year career, which came to include seven in the majors. He was a Greenville, South Carolina, lad.

There are no baseball-reference entries for the Royal Giants nor for the Red Birds and their Riverside ball field, described as a “pea patch” by the Citizen. Yet on Labor Day 1913, the crowd overflowed the stands onto the sidelines and gave “a few lessons in rooting to those who make a habit of visiting Oates Park.”

“Some team won that game yesterday,” the reporter said, playing the comic, “but just who did no one seemed able to tell.”

More: Visiting Our Past: The boys of Beacon’s baseball team

Cigars were handed out after the game, including to the umpire. The scorekeeper took a midnight train to somewhere to deliver the box score, and never arrived.

The “manager of the Mountaineers,” the reporter advised, “might do well to look over those ball-tossers from the ranks of the paint brush artists and the wielders of the hammer” to find among them the next Ty Cobb or Joe Jackson.

The land cost just $200

A 1912 bird’s-eye map of Asheville drawn by T.M. Fowler of Passaic, New Jersey, shows where Riverside Park was and depicts tiny figures playing baseball on the diamond.

The lithograph, commissioned by the Board of Trade, places the park on the river side of Riverside Drive between Pearson Bridge (formerly Carrier Bridge) and the stump dump.

When Asheville Electric Company, which had run a trolley line to the park, bought the property in 1901 from S.M. Hamill and engaged the Riverside Park Amusement Company to develop it as a major attraction, they were building on a place that had been used for baseball and horse racing since the 1880s, according to George Taylor at imaginerding.com.

The deed, filed June 1, 1901, records that “9¼ acres more or less” had sold for $200. Hamill had purchased it from the C.S. Haney family in 1899, and there the trail going back disappears.

But the trail forward shines like a viewfinder.

He shot the sheriff

Soon after the park opened in 1902, it advertised its Kinodrome, an arena for showing 5-minute movies such as “The St. Louis Expo” and “The Life of Napoleon.” The flicks were part of a new mix in the vaudeville acts.

Features movies were shown outside at night on a screen erected on an island in the artificial lake. The park also had a casino, dance hall, bandstand and carousel.

At night, the place sometimes took on a carnival atmosphere. On the night of July 4, 1903, a drunk shot the sheriff, J. Henry Reed.

The sheriff was sitting on a bridge railing when he saw a flash come out of an outbuilding and realized he was shot. A bullet had lodged in his coat.

He and his deputies apprehended three men who described the shooter as someone who had just wanted to make a noise. “The shooting was accidental,” Reed reported, “and the man was probably drinking and feeling gay and had fired off his pistol recklessly.”

In August 1907, Prof. W. M. Rand exhibited his “educated dogs,” including Col. Curney, who could spell and add. He had another dog, a little white terrier, that ran up a ladder, took a look over the crowd and dove “head first down into a sheet spread out to catch him,” the newspaper said.

Wolfe in the park

On certain evenings, when Thomas Wolfe was a boy — around 1907 — his father, W.O. Wolfe, had taken him to Riverside Park.

They saw outdoor movies projected onto a screen on an island in the artificial lake, “and,” David Herbert Donald writes in his biography of Wolfe, “for the rest of his life Tom remembered seeing ‘The Fall of Troy,’ with the spectacular wooden horse and the boulders that the Trojans hurled at the attacking Greeks, so obviously made of cardboard that they floated through the air like feathers.”

Bob Terrell devoted seven pages in his book “Grandpa’s Town” to a description of activities at the park.

Roamer Davis, Terrell’s fictionalized grandfather, relates his trip with friends to the Fourth of July extravaganza in 1906.

Streetcars left Pack Square every 15 minutes. The Boston Italian Band played for three hours. Roamer competed in foot races, didn’t win, and he and friends “pulled off shirts and shoes and went swimming in the lake. Patrolman J.W. Bailey tried to coax them out, and when they would not come he threw sand on their backs.”

John Drake pinned E.M. Black in a wrestling match. At the edge of the carnival grounds, the boys went up to a wagon marked “Wild Man from Borneo,” and “a hairy figure lunged at them, slamming against the bars.”

That was also the day that “Sidney Greenbaum taught Roamer how to make his own fireworks” with kitchen matches.

On May 10, 1915, Riverside Park accommodated a livestock show, presented by the American Shorthorn Breeders’ Association, brought in by the Board of Trade to stimulate stock raising in the region.

On July 10, 1916, raging flood waters swept away Riverside Park’s buildings, amusements, lake and fields, leaving a landscape of gashes, sand ridges and wreckage.

In the 1960s, the June 2016 RiverLink newsletter noted, the site was used as a landfill, polluting the river. In 2011, RiverLink purchased some of the land to supplement its Wilma Dykeman RiverWay and helped French Broad Outfitters establish its station in a converted tire store where the scooped-out lake had once flickered with oversized romance.

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. Follow him on Twitter @WNC_chronicler; email him at RNeufeld@charter.net; call his at 828-505-1973.