Stories from the Smith-McDowell House
In 2021, this immersive exhibit was on display in recreated rooms throughout the 1840s Smith-McDowell House and on its grounds.
In this virtual version, you can view the halls, stairwells, rooms, and grounds, and meet many of the people who walked these same pathways over a century ago and whose stories represent a microcosm of the history of Western North Carolina.
Stories from the Smith-McDowell House
Welcome
Just a few miles north of George Vanderbilt's grand Biltmore Estate is a different kind of mansion–one that was nearly 50 years old when Vanderbilt's crew began construction in 1895. This house is now home to the Western North Carolina Historical Association.
In the 1840s, James McConnell Smith, who was rumored to be the first white child born west of the Blue Ridge in North Carolina, broke ground on a large brick country house on his property overlooking the confluence of the Swannanoa and French Broad rivers–just one tract of the more than 30,000 acres in the county he would eventually own.
Smith paid few people to build his house or run his many businesses. Rather he purchased people, whom he would enslave, to perform the work. By the 1840s, when this house was being constructed, Smith held at least 70 people captive.
Once the house was complete, the Smiths used the property as a vacation destination from their main residence in Asheville, about two miles away. The house only became a full-time residence for a family when James's daughter, Sarah, and her husband, William McDowell, purchased the house at auction in 1857 from her brother's estate. The McDowells continued to hold people captive on the property, which contained numerous outbuildings, including at least six "slave houses," until April 1865 when freedom finally came to people enslaved in Asheville.
The McDowells lived in the house until 1881, when, in debt after the Civil War, they sold the property. From that date on, the house saw a rotating series of occupants resulting in periods of grand renovations and serious neglect, that have added new chapters to the history that it holds.
Photograph: The McDowell Family outside their family home, 1875.
