Stories from the Smith-McDowell House (Asheville, NC)

 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.

Buncombe County, North Carolina, 1857 Tax Report

 

"Report of the North Carolina Comptroller of Public Accounts, for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 1857."

"Statement, Exhibiting the valuation of real estate, and the Taxes derived from each subject of taxation in the several Counties of the State; also the Taxes levied by the Courts of Pleas and Quarter Sessions for County purposes, as follows."

Source: The Weekly Standard (Raleigh, North Carolina), Wednesday, 27 January 1858

 [https://www.newspapers.com/image/58243336 - accessed 19 December 2022].

Thomas Gunn Ancestry

Thomas Gunn, Jr. (ca. 1738 VA - 1800 NC), James B. Kerner (2007)

Thomas² Gunn, Jr. (Thomas Gunn, Sr.¹) was born in or near Amelia County, VA circa 1738.¹⁸ Amelia County, VA was formed from Brunswick and Prince George Counties in 1734. Nottoway Co., VA was formed from Amelia County in 1788. Before Nottoway County established its own government, it was known as Nottoway Parish, a district of Amelia County. Thomas served in the Virginia Colonial Militia during the French and Indian War. He was paid five pounds, six shillings for militia service in 1756, During the French and Indian War, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed an act for the defense of the frontier of the colony on September 14, 1758. Thomas Gunn was among those soldiers mentioned in the schedules attached to that act. Thomas was listed in the Amelia County unit.

Thomas Gunn (or his father) was mentioned in court records in Lunenburg Co., VA in 1758. Note: Lunenburg Co., VA was formed from Brunswick Co., VA in 1746. On April 4, 1758, Thomas Gunn of Amelia Co., VA purchased 300 acres near his sister, Edith Hogan, on the north side of the Roanoke River in Lunenburg Co., VA, (present-day Mecklenburg Co., VA). Note: Mecklenburg Co., VA was formed from part of Lunenburg Co., VA in 1765.

Thomas Gunn (or his father) was listed as a resident of Lunenburg Co., VA per the 1760 tax lists.

Hanging of Sneed and Henry: Dr. James Freeman Eppes Hardy, M.D. (1802-1882)

At Asheville [May 1835]

In the following excerpt, Allen Turner Davidson¹ describes the events surrounding his trip as a sixteen-year-old to see the hanging in Asheville of James Sneed and James Henry. [footnotes and paragraph breaks added.]

"But when we got on the top of the hill west of the French Broad river, and looked down and saw the splendid river and the long narrow bridge, then known as Smith's bridge,² I was carried away completely. It was the largest river and the longest bridge I had seen. The bridge was kept by William Irwin³, I think. He lived at the same old house which stood there till recently on the west side of the river. We came straight up the hill to the top, where Melke's⁴ house stands, and where the old log Baptist church used to stand.

"I then began to see signs of 'town' by that time, and my eyes began to shine. I remember distinctly to have seen the fields about the present station of the railroad. Branan Patton⁵ lived there then. Aunt Mary Smith⁶, Dan'l's wife⁷, lived above on the river, whose house we could not see from that point, but we could see the curling smoke of the evening meal ascending from the habitation. These were pointed out to me by Paxton Cumming⁸, who had ridden this circuit and knew all the points of interest round about.

Smith's Bridge (Asheville, North Carolina)

"A Tale of Two Bridges: How the Smith-McDowell House is Tied to Spans of the French Broad River" by John Turk

Smith's Bridge

How did the builder of the Smith-McDowell House make his money? The old-fashioned way: he earned it. At first his fortune was based upon real estate; in 1826, he bought the land on which he would later build the house. But this was just the beginning. While he eventually built an empire based on earnings from his hotel, general store, and other enterprises, his first real moneymaker was a bridge.

In the 1820s, the Buncombe Turnpike was constructed to replace and organize myriad trails used to herd livestock from Tennessee and North Carolina to railroad connections in South Carolina. In Buncombe County, a good deal of this turnpike ran along the east bank of the French Broad River. Smith immediately identified a problem: How do the thousands of small farmers on the west side of the river get their livestock across the river so they can hook up with the turnpike? His solution: build a bridge.

Samuel Davidson Place, Bee Tree, 1828

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Samuel Davidson Place, Bee Tree, 1828

"In 1928, WNC Left Dr. William Blanding in Awe" by Rob Neufeld (Ashville Citizen-Times, 4 January 2021).

Buncombe Turnpike

 The Buncombe Turnpike, the big commercial enterprise of antebellum Western North Carolina, arrives at a resort in Hickory Nut Gap, as depicted in the mural at the McClure-Ager home in Fairview.

Source: Asheville Citizen Times (Asheville, NC), 12 October 2020.

See: Drovers' Road

Zebulon Baird Vance Monument (Asheville, NC)

The Vance Monument in Asheville, NC, is a tribute to a white supremacist, the leader of a political party that destroyed the promise of Reconstruction and imposed segregation upon North Carolina. The monument is a towering insult to African-Americans, an affront to American ideals and an embarrassment to the city of Asheville.

Zebulon Baird Vance (1830-1894)

1. Slave owner. Son of a slave owner.

2. Opposed secession until Fort Sumter was fired on/Lincoln asked North Carolina for troops. By the time North Carolina seceeded Vance was a captain commanding a company known as the "Rough and Ready Guards." Later he was elected colonel of the 26th North Carolina Troops, which he ably led in battle at New Bern in March 1862 and shortly afterwards in the Seven Days fighting before Richmond. Thus, Vance fought for the Confederacy.

3. Vance was elected North Carolina governor in 1862. While he had disputes with the "central" Confederate government in Richmond, Virginia, he never waivered in his support of the Confederate cause.

4. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Zebulon Vance owned six slaves. After the war he stated the following about "perfect negro equality": "There are indications that the radical abolitionists … intend to force perfect negro equality upon us. Should this be done, and there is nothing to prevent it, it will revive an already half formed determination in me to leave the U.S. forever."

5. Later, in 1870, Vance stated: "[T]he African negro, the descendants of barbarian tribes who for 4,000 years have contributed nothing to, though in close contact with, civilization."

6. Having a North Carolina county named for him, Vance County, Zebulon Vance referred to it as "Zeb's Black Baby."

7. Vance attempted to make a distinction between civil rights and social rights in 1874, stating the following with respect to a bill introduced in the US House of Representatives: "There is no railway car in all the South which the colored man cannot ride in. That is his civil right. This bill proposes that he should have the opportunity or the right to go into a first-class car and sit with white gentlemen and white ladies. I submit if that is not a social right. There is a distinction between the two.” "No race, sir, in the world has been able to stand before the pure Caucasian. An antagonism of races will not be good for the colored man." "It [the bill] begets hopes and raises an ambition in the minds of the colored man that can never be realized."

8. As late as 1878 Vance voiced his opposition to emancipation at a meeting of African Americans celebrating Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: "I appear in your meeting to-day simply to acknowledge the respect you have shown me by inviting me as the Governor of the State to visit your assemblage. You cannot of course expect me to join with you in celebrating this day, the anniversary of that emancipation which I struggled so long to prevent, and which I, in common with all the people of my race in the South, regard as an act of unconstitutional violence to the one party, and as an injury to the other." Thus, Vance regarded the Emancipation Proclamation as an act of unconstitutional violence.

Ruth Davidson (1765-1826) NSDAR

Ruth Davidson

"Ruth Davidson, a woman handsome in appearance, was remarkably bright and attractive. She and her entire family were ardent Whigs. It is said that after the defeat of the American Army at Camden, S.C., when the Brits were preparing to invade our State [North Carolina], General Green [Greene], who was in the hills of Virginia reorganizing his forces, was anxious to communicate with some detached American troops in South Carolina.

"It was almost impossible to do this on account of the activities of Tarleton and Ferguson. . . . It was necessary to send a message through the sparsely settled region along the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Ruth volunteered to be the messenger and without an escort or guide succeeded in delivering the message.

"Thus another brave woman was honored when a [DAR] chapter in Asheville was called the Ruth Davidson Chapter."

Source: Pendleton, Hazel E. "Patriotic Women of North Carolina for Whom DAR Chapters are Named." DAR Magazine, 1962.

Ruth Davidson Chapter NSDAR

Walton War

After the Revolutionary War concluded the issue continued with respect to western lands claimed by the original states. These lands eventually were ceded to the United States to be used to pay soldiers and applied toward the national debt. This required, among other things, that the boundary line between North Carolina and South Carolina be completed:

"Commissioners Appointed in 1814. Pursuant to the above provisional articles of agreement North Carolina in 1814 appointed Gen. Thomas Love, Gen. Montfort Stokes and Col. John Patton commissioners to meet other commissioners from South Carolina to run and mark the boundary line between the two States in accordance with the recommendation of the commissioners who had met and agreed, "at McKinney's on Toxaway river on the 4th of Sept. 1813."

Other Early Explorers: In the case of Avery v. Walker, (8 N. C., p. 117) it appears . . . that Col. John Patton, the father of Lorenzo and Montreville Patton of Buncombe, and who owned the meadow land on the Swannanoa river which was sold to George W. Vanderbilt by Preston Patton, and the "haunted house" at the ford of that river, when the stage road left South Main street at what is now Victoria Road and crossed the Swannanoa, there, instead of at Biltmore, was then county surveyor of Buncombe, and refused to survey land on Ocona Lufty for Waightstill Avery because it was "on the frontier and the Indian boundary had not then actually been run out, and it might be dangerous to survey near the line."

Source: Arthur, John Preston. Western North Carolina: A History from 1730 to 1913. Published 1914 by the Edward Buncombe Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution of Asheville. Reprint Edition: Johnson City, Tennessee: The Overmountain Press, 1996 (pages 29-30 and 77-78).

_______________

Today it seems unlikely that a tract of land lying within the present bounds of Transylvania County would have been claimed as part of the State of Georgia. But that was the case when in 1803 Georgia laid claim to the territory and named a new county for George Walton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. North Carolina led by Gov. James Turner actively defended their claim leading to confusion for the 800 or so residents of the region. The dispute was submitted to Congress, where a committee initially accepted Georgia's claim, arguing that a twelve-mile-wide strip had legitimately been ceded to that state by the federal government. Commissioners were authorized to survey a line along the 35th parallel, then accepted as the state boundary.

Meanwhile lawlessness prevailed in the area. It was difficult for Buncombe County to collect taxes from individuals viewing themselves as Georgia residents. Events came to a head late in 1804 when three citizens were assaulted by Waltonians. One of them, Constable John Havner, was struck over the left eye with the butt of a rifle and mortally wounded. Upon his death, on December 15, the colonel of the Buncombe County militia ordered out a detachment of seventy-two men and marched them into "Walton County." Ten Walton officials were taken prisoner, but escaped before they were brought to trial.

On June 15, 1807, officials of the two states met at the Buncombe County Courthouse and set out to fix the boundary. Joseph Caldwell of the University of North Carolina and Joseph Meigs of Georgia used scientific equipment to take astronomical readings and fix the 35th parallel. The first place they took a reading, they found, was twenty miles north of that line. All subsequent readings taken were also well north of the 35th parallel. The Georgia commissioners were "astonished and mortified." They relinquished claim to the territory the same year and amnesty was granted to those responsible for the violence, but confusion reigned for some time to come. The 1810 census listed residents of Walton County. In 1818 Georgia created a new county elsewhere and named it for George Walton. As recently as 1971 Georgia considered reopening a separate dispute about the boundary and the North Carolina legislature "in a jocular mood" mobilized the National Guard to protect the state from usurpers.


References:

Martin Reidinger, "The Walton War and the Georgia-North Carolina Boundary Dispute," (unpublished manuscript, copy in the North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1981).

Marvin L. Skaggs, North Carolina Boundary Disputes Involving Her Southern Line (1941).

John Preston Arthur, Western North Carolina: A History (1914).

Daniel R. Goodloe, “The North Carolina and Georgia Boundary,” North Carolina Booklet, III, no. 12 (April 1904): 5-22.

William S. Powell, North Carolina through Four Centuries (1989).

Mary Connally: "Lady Mary and the Cult"

Asheville Citizen-Times, 10 November 1991, Sunday, Page 35

Smith-McDowell House: "Twists and Turns"

Smith-McDowell House

"Twists and Turns"

In 1881, Alexander Garrett and wife Elizabeth purchased the Smith-McDowell House (purportedly then called "Buck House") from William Wallace McDowell and wife Sarah Lucinda Smith McDowell (daughter of James McConnell Smith, who built the house).

The Garretts, along with their son Robert Urey Garrett, his wife Mary Frances Tarr Garrett, and six-year-old granddaughter Alexandra, moved from St. Louis to Asheville. The family had emigrated from Ireland in 1847. Alexander Garrett had amassed a sizeable fortune as a businessman in the midwest. He retired to Asheville to enjoy the climate and to engage in land speculation. The elder Garrett sold the Buck House for $1 to his son Robert Urey Garrett (who owned the property until 1898).

Shufordville and Fort Shuford

HeardTell: Stories From the North Carolina Room

"Running up and down Cane Creek . . . is a wide belt of lime rock from which, for more than a century, quicklime has been manufactured in large quantities on Cane Creek by burning. . . . From this belt of lime rock Limestone Creek, once known by an objectionable designation, takes its name and Limestone Township of Buncombe County is called."

A History of Buncombe County County North Carolina, F. A. Sondley, LLD

"When certain varieties of quartz and limestone are strongly rubbed, they give off the odor of rotton (sic) eggs. This peculiar smell is occasioned by the evolution of sulphureted (sic) hydrogen ; and substances which possess this property are termed fetid."

"The Odors of Minerals", Scientific American 13, 18, 139 (January 1858)

Today, Limestone Township is split in half.  One side abuts Avery Creek Township and the other, Fairview Township. Asheville's southern city limits run right down the middle of the township along Hendersonville Road (U.S. Route 25). Arden, Avery's Creek, the town of Biltmore Forest, Royal Pines, and Skyland are familiar communities in the township.  Have you heard tell of Limestone or Shuford(s)ville?

Daniel Smith's "Long Tom"

Visiting Our Past: More WNC artifacts in Mr. Smith's musket and a WWII poster

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Daniel Smith's Musket

"Long Tom" is the name that Buncombe County pioneer Daniel Smith gave his 6-foot-long flintlock musket.

He had it during Rutherford's Campaign against The Cherokee in 1776. He used it at the Battle of Kings Mountain, the decisive defeat of the British by Revolutionary "Overmountain Men" in 1780.

He "was sentimentally proud of his revolutionary services, (and) frequently referred to that in conversation," his friend David Lowry Swain, state governor and then UNC president, testified in 1845 in support of the Smith children's pension application.

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"Long Tom" went with Smith to Western North Carolina, where he settled in 1785, avenging the murder of his wife's uncle, settler Col. Samuel Davidson, by Indians in Swannanoa. After building a home on a hill (probably at the site of present-day Fernihurst) above what is now called Nasty Branch south of Depot Street, Smith took his rifle with him to the public square in newly created Asheville, where he was "almost daily seen," historian Foster Sondley noted in 1912, "mounted on his large white horse," acknowledged as a legendary "Indian killer."

Zeb Vance found his value in Reems Creek

Zebulon Baird Vance

"Zeb Vance found his value in Reems Creek" by Rob Neufeld (Asheville Citizen-Times, 1 July 2019)

When David Vance, grandfather of future governor Zebulon Vance, moved to Reems Creek in the late 1780s, he was one of several settlers with Revolutionary War pasts who were looking to be part of what he considered an ideal community. That involved a large family, a working farm, a nearby church, a water powered mill, and some kind of school and slaves.

The condition of slaves lives and of the lives of freedmen, before and after Emancipation, varied greatly. The Vances perpetrated a big family model, which involved kindness and love as well as paternalism and bondage.

When David Vance was dying in 1813 he expressed in his will the desire that his two families of slaves, headed by Richard and Aggy and Jo and Leah, be given "full liberty." "Full liberty" meant, in that time and place, freedom to choose their households, to travel, and to not worry about losing their children. The State slave code required approval by a county court for emancipating the slaves. It also required that freedmen carry and present documents when they were away from their homes. The Vance's "liberated" slaves had to have tickets from their owners as permission to travel. All slaves and freedmen had to fear white men who were given license to shoot runaways.

Danlel Smith Cabin Location: Asheville, North Carolina

Where Was the Daniel Smith House?

What Do the Records Show?

Forster A. Sondley provided the following in 1912: "His residence stood on the hillside immediately east of the railroad and directly north of the first small branch which runs into the French Broad River above the Passenger Station of the Southern Railway at Asheville, North Carolina. The site of his home is now within the corporate limits of the City of Asheville. . . ." Sondley added: "In later life Colonel Smith was almost daily seen on the streets of Asheville mounted on his large white horse."

 Similarly, in 1922 Theodore Davidson wrote: Daniel Smith "settled immediately east of the railroad at the first branch above the passenger station at Asheville, on the hill just north of the branch where his cabin stood for many years, and where he died May 17, 1824. He was buried with military honors on the hill where Fernihurst now stands; but about 1875 his body was removed to the Newton Academy graveyard where it now rests."

An April 1796 Buncombe County court record documents the purchase by Daniel Smith of 300 acres of land. Around 1795 Daniel Smith paid £4, 14 shillings, four pence, to Benjamin Yardley "in part pay for the building a house for" Daniel Smith. In April 1792 the Buncombe County court ordered that [among others] Daniel Smith be on a jury to view and lay off a road from Colonel William Davidson's on the Swannanoa River to Benjamin Davidson's Creek "the nearest and best way according to law." This was the first order in regard to roads ever made in Buncombe County. The road became known as Boilston Road.

Portrait of the Past: Aston Park Hospital operating room, circa 1940

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Aston Park Health Care Center grew out of Aston Park Hospital, located in Asheville on the northwest corner of what had been Aston Street and South French Broad Avenue. The hospital had opened in 1927 as the French Broad Hospital. The name change to Aston occurred in the 1940s when the street the hospital was on, Willow Street., was renamed in honor of Edward Aston, historic Asheville booster and mayor. The 1940s was also when the Asheville Colored Hospital was opened, leading Dr. John Walker to leave Aston Park, where he’d served as the only African-American physician in a local hospital. One of his specialties was administering anesthesia, which he did for operations in the room pictured in this 1927 photo by Ewart M. Ball.

Aston Park had 45 beds in the 1940s, whereas Mission Hospital had 134; St Joseph’s, 95; Biltmore Hospital, 50; Norburn Hospital, 120; and the Asheville Colored Hospital, 35 beds. The French Broad Hospital had itself gone through an expansion because the newspaper reported cases related to it before ground breaking took place in August. For instance, in March, a young woman was trying to recover at the hospital from peritonitis after Ralph Riddle had seduced her and then poisoned her to abort the fetus. In 1967, Aston Park Hospital began making the shift to nursing home care as Memorial Mission Hospital assumed acute care responsibility. Photo courtesy Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville. --Rob Neufeld, RNeufeld@charter.net, @WNC_chronicler

Source: Asheville Citizen-Times (Asheville, North Carolina), 11 June 2019.

Ripley-Shepherd Building

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Ripley-Shepherd Building

The Ripley family enjoyed early prominence in Hendersonville, especially the colonel himself. According to Lila Ripley Barnwell (the daughter of Col. Valentine Ripley) in an article that appeared in the Times News on August 29, 1938, "Colonel Valentine Ripley, a native of Rockbridge County, Virginia, came to this section in the (eighteen) thirties, settling first in Asheville, where he married Miss Ruth Smith, daughter of James Smith, who was the first white child born west of the Blue Ridge in North Carolina. Shortly afterward Henderson County was cut off from Buncombe, and because of interest in the mail route, Colonel Ripley came here to live. He had large land interests, owning thousands of acres in the county.

No citizen was ever more interested in the progress and development of this section. After the War Between the States, Colonel Ripley formed a partnership with Captain M. C. Toms in the mercantile business. He was too much a lover of the out of doors and fine horses to like the confinement of that life, and while he carefully attended to the business the practical management was left largely in the capable hands of Captain Toms. One of the greatest ambitions of his life was a railroad for Hendersonville and for years he spent time and money for this accomplishment, living to see his dream realized about four months before his death in 1879."

Source: Hendersonville Historic Preservation Commission.

Harry David Blomberg Family

Marilyn Blomberg Patton Interview

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Flood of 1916

Asheville Railroad Yard Flooded 1916

On July 14, 1916, the worst flood in western North Carolina’s history occurred after six days of torrential rain. In one 24-hour period the region saw more than half of a normal year’s total rainfall. The 22 inches of rain that fell that day set the record for the most rainfall in a single day in the United States.

Because the ground was saturated, most of the water immediately filled streams and rivers, causing them to reach flood stage in just a few hours. Eighty people lost their lives and the property damage surpassed $22 million, $1 million of that in Asheville alone. Asheville and Hendersonville were completely cut off from the outside for weeks. Railroad tracks that were not destroyed had their supports washed out from under them, leaving tracks eerily suspended over mud-covered ravines—895 miles of track were rendered useless.

Everyone was taken by surprise at the speed with which the water rose. People were stranded in trees when their cars or homes were overwhelmed and they had nowhere else to go. Industrial plants along the rivers were swept away and landslides engulfed homes. For most of western North Carolina this flood remains the benchmark for disasters.