Visiting Our Past: Toasting ups and downs of the 1920s in WNC

I have been contacted by a Florida writer with North Carolina connections to provide perspective on Asheville in the 1920s, and it makes me think of the view that the decade was Asheville's Golden Age, fed in part by investments from Florida, which had been stung by a freeze in 1924.

The 1920s was certainly a golden age for subdivisions and downtown architecture (Douglas Ellington and E.W. Grove being the stars). Population doubled. A host of new influences seasoned the stew of country and city elements.

Yet how you view the period depends on the facts you select, a process that can create as much bias or truth as fiction. Thus, I present the following factual treatment: a selective chronology.

Jan. 17, 1920. National prohibition takes effect, nearly 12 years after North Carolina put the kibosh on mash. The ban was lifted in 1933, making the 20s the decade of moonshining, revenuers and illegal trade, including places that gave Asheville its reputation for the high life.

August 1920. Edith Vanderbilt sells nearly 1,500 acres of the Biltmore Estate to a development company that creates Biltmore Forest. Chauncey Beadle designs the landscaping; Donald Ross, the country club golf course; William Dodge, many of the early homes.

The intent, Hiden Ramsey stated in his 1925 history of Biltmore Forest, was to create a community where "persons of moderate means could build homes that would embody on a smaller scale the same ideals which actuated Mr. Vanderbilt in the creation of the Biltmore Estate."

June 11, 1921. Preacher "Cyclone Mack" (Rev. Dr. Baxter F. McLendon) addresses the faithful at a five-day tent meeting during a heat wave in Asheville. "Do you people want to see more tourists visit your town?" he exhorted. "Well, if you do, just put a saloon on each corner ... and some dance halls, and make them rotten."

There were no saloons, per se; there were pool halls, hotels and speakeasies.And there were dances everywhere you looked — it was a golden age of flapping and hopping.

1922. Haw Creek School is established, replacing a schoolhouse funded by Asheville's Episcopal Church and run by a circuit-riding preacher named George Bell. Bell was a scholar — he knew seven languages — as well as a stern disciplinarian. He kept black gum switches behind his desk.

Three churches in the community provided a joyful release for many, and the 1920s was a golden age of shape note singing in Haw Creek.

1923. James Thaddeus Cathey and his wife, Ida Lou Eva Wright, left their productive acreage along Pole Creek in Candler to rent land from Eva's brother, Zeb, on Justice Ridge Road — just so their children could walk to Candler Academy, an early school.

Their daughter, Florence, and Florence's cousin, Jennie Cathey Robinson, became key members of the Candler High School championship girls' basketball team. Factory villages had inaugurated women's sports; high schools followed.

Sept. 26, 1923. Two hundred white citizens, led by a sheriff's deputy, marched to the feldspar miners' shanty town in Spruce Pine and began the forcible eviction of every African-American citizen from the area. An escaped prison road crew worker and a rape allegation had set off the hysteria.

J. E. Burleson, a prominent Mitchell County citizen, wrote Gov. Cameron Morrison, urging the state to prosecute the men who had caused the evictions, which, he warned, "is going to keep men from investing in the mines," and lead to economic consequences.

Morrison, a "Red Shirts" white supremacist leader, called the National Guard into Spruce Pine to enable the return of African-Americans.

1925. Architect Henry Gaines arrives in Asheville and is thrilled by real estate offices selling lots in new subdivisions with the aid of live orchestras.

April 18, 1927. Jimmie Rodgers and his band, the Jimmie Rodgers Entertainers, with Jack Pierce (guitar), Jack Grant (mandolin/banjo) and Claude Grant (banjo), perform a show on the newly established radio station, WWNC. The station had been started Feb. 21, 1927, by the Asheville Chamber of Commerce for reports on weather and road conditions, and music at night.

Jimmie and Carrie, his wife of six years, had moved to Asheville the previous year. In 1927, Rodgers recorded songs with Okeh Records, and in 1928, his "Blue Yodel No. 1" became a national phenomenon, giving a huge boost to commercialized country music.

1928. Asheville begins charging higher rates to non-city customers of its water system in order to offset impounding a reservoir in the Bee Tree Watershed; and purchasing 4,000 acres of the North Fork Watershed.

The policy took into account the lower ratio of users to feet of line outside of the city. The 1933 Sullivan Act, imposed by the state, would prohibit differential rates and became the basis of legal suits that remain a major issue today.

June 4 - 8, 1928. Asheville's Chamber of Commerce started the Rhododendron Festival and elected a queen by popular ballot.

Pranksters stuffed the ballot boxes with the name of a well-known lady of ill repute. She won. She rode the float.

The next year, city leaders changed the rules to have the king and queen chosen by official appointment.

The Rhododendron Festival lasted through 1941, gaining national fame. Though Black Friday caused the crash in 1929, it was the decade of the 1930s that was the golden age of sociability.

Fred Seely writes Dennis Brummit, N.C. Attorney General, on behalf of Eerste Nederlandsche Kunzydfabriek Arnhem — E.N.K.A., a Dutch rayon manufacturer looking to build a plant and village in Buncombe County.

The firm became a major employer, and one of a handful of corporations — along with Beacon Blankets, Sayles Bleachery, and Burlington Mills — that provided homes and community life within its boundaries.

1929. The federal government starts condemning land for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly "Visiting Our Past" column for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published Jan. 13, 2014.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting Our Past: Toasting ups and downs of the 1920s in WNC