Visiting Our Past: Strong women were the backbone at Sherrill's Inn in Fairview
The drive from Asheville to the foot of Hickory Nut Gap in what is now Fairview, which takes 15 minutes today, took newlyweds Elizabeth Cramer and James G.K. McClure 45 minutes in 1916. That summer, the Chicago couple, touring in their Hudson, had arrived at their dream home, a dilapidated, pre-Civil War turnpike hotel called Sherrill's Inn.
The property looked romantic to Elizabeth, productive and health-restoring to James. When the owner, 80-year-old "Judge" Phillips, led James inside to talk turkey, Phillips' 18-year-old wife and former ward turned toward Elizabeth on the porch and unburdened her heart.
Sobbing on Elizabeth's shoulder, she begged that the newcomers "buy the house so her husband would move back to town and she could leave her solitary rural existence behind," John Ager recounts in his biography of James McClure, "We Plow God's Fields." Elizabeth had "wondered why one bride was in such a hurry to move in when another was so anxious to move out."
The men who have moved into Sherrill's Inn over the years attained much in public life. Bedford Sherrill ran the mail service to Tennessee. James McClure founded the Farmers Federation. McClure's son-in-law, Jamie Clarke, served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Yet it is the women of the house whose fame the walls proclaim.
Nancy "Ann" Ashworth, an accomplished herb doctor, had accompanied her husband, John, to the site around 1800. Court records show that he'd been convicted of supporting Tories and then absolved of guilt. Nonetheless, the Ashworths' trip from Tryon was probably a kind of flight to the wilderness, and their first building was a log fort.
One winter night, when John was away and Ann was roasting a pig in the fireplace, a ravenous wolf pack congregated outside, Ager relates, citing family lore. Nancy heated a poker and thrust it under the door. A wolf bit at it and burned his mouth, causing other wolves to snap at the smell of meat and the pack to disperse, fighting.
John died in 1806 and Ann took over management of the estate with gusto. "She drank, wore lace and frills on her petticoats, was a tough businesswoman, craved money and worldly possessions, owned slaves, cast spells, cursed people who crossed her, and did as she pleased," Fairview historian Bruce Whitaker wrote in the Fairview Town Crier. Cane Creek Baptist Church brought Ashworth up on charges of sorcery but didn't follow through — in fear of her powers, Whitaker surmises.
After Ann's death in 1833, her heirs sold their homestead to Bedford Sherrill, who enlarged the house and opened an inn for wealthy vacationers in the summer and livestock drovers in the fall. The East Coast elite traveled to the getaway in a nine-person Albany coach pulled by four horses over ruts and through mud. A horn signaled to Mrs. Sherrill how many guests were arriving and how much food she should prepare.
Elizabeth McClure, enchanted by the history, painted a multi-panel mural of the turnpike activity, placing Mrs. Sherrill on her porch in a plain peasant's frock and cap as a man in tails helps a gowned miss down from a carriage. But painting hadn't been Elizabeth's first activity on the estate. She had engaged, with a corps of local helpers, in the hard farm work of turning Sherrill's Inn into a place of beauty and bounty.
Years later, Ager reports, she'd told her daughter, Elspeth, "that when she began a painting project she became so absorbed that she couldn't keep her mind on the daily routine." The daily routine began early and ended at teatime, before which she took a break to bathe and dress in a long gown.
Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly local history feature, "Visiting Our Past," for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published Oct. 11, 2007.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting Our Past: Strong women were the backbone Sherrill's Inn
