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VACATION & TRAVEL A N
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SEPTEMBER 7 - 13, 2016
Asheville: Creativity In The Mountains In past decades, when young people traveled, as if in a hive, toward certain cities, it was often to places like New York City’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s North Beach. Those places have become so expensive that such restless youth now find other cities. One of them has been the unsuspecting mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina, a resort area long favored by the movers and shakers of 20th-century life. The scenic Blue Ridge Mountains BY JOE SCOTCHIE jscotcHie@antonmediagroup.com
The city’s Grove Park Inn is a famous resort hotel. An image from 1917 dramatized the city’s attraction as the men who literally made the modern world gathered for a photo. The men? Henry Ford (mass production of automobiles), Thomas Edison (motion pictures, electric lighting, long distance phone calls) and Henry Firestone (mass production of automobile tires) were all photographed with Edwin Wiley Grove, founder of the resort. The folk arts center of Western North Carolina, Asheville has enjoyed a history as colorful of any town its size in America. Named for a Revolutionary War hero, the city reached a zenith during The War Between The States. Numbering only 1,000 residents, Asheville gave the state its wartime governor (Zebulon Vance), its attorney general (Augustus
Merrimon) and the president of the University of North Carolina (David Swain). During the war, a battle took place in April 1865, days after Appomattox. Word
so, some senseless bloodletting took place where the University of North Carolina at Asheville stands. With the construction of a
George Washington Vanderbilt’s famous Biltmore House traveled slow in those days and neither Billy Yank nor Johnny Reb were aware that the terms of surrender had been reached. And
railroad hub in 1880, Asheville now had an important link to the outside world, paving the way for it to become a tourist destina-
tion. In time, Asheville would be renowned as an intensely creative city, something that remains true today with its annual Folk Arts festival. In 1929, Asheville native Thomas Wolfe published his autobiographical first novel, Look Homeward, Angel. The thinly-veiled effort outraged numerous residents, so much so that Wolfe did not return to his hometown for a good seven years. However, the novel was a critical success with a London reviewer declaring it to be the American South’s first great contribution to world literature. (It was published the same year as William Faulkner’s masterpiece, The Sound And The Fury.) Wolfe was a highly influential writer, especially here in New York. Such postwar novelists as James Jones, Norman Mailer, John Cheever, Jack Kerouac and William Styron have
see ASHVEVILLE on page 14A
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