During the 1800s, magazines in the northeastern United States began carrying stories about the "unusual" behavior of people in other places. They were called "local color" stories and tended to focus on "bizarre" behavior. One of the areas targeted for this type of story was Appalachia.
The Civil War devastated Appalachia. Many people ended up poor, isolated and uneducated, and they became the subjects of these magazine stories. They were presented as "backward mountaineers living in a region within, but not part of, modern American life."
Of course, there were thousands of people in the Northeast who were also poor, isolated and uneducated, but readers preferred imported stories of poverty rather than hearing of their own domestic problems. The stories about Appalachia were distorted. They focused on the peculiar and the outrageous. They ignored the natural beauty of the area, and the skilled, intelligent and responsible people who lived there. I recently traveled through the Appalachian districts surrounding Asheville, N.C., to see what this part of the world is really like.
Ancestors of the Cherokee settled in North Carolina over 10,000 years ago. The first European to arrive was the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto, whose expedition marched through in the 1540s. Other early inhabitants were Scottish, Irish, English and African. During the late 1700s, wealthy plantation owners trying to escape summer heat of the low country began visiting the mountains around Asheville. By the 1800s, wealthy people from all over America were stopping in.
George Vanderbilt was one of those visitors. Vanderbilt had inherited a fortune from his grandfather, the shipping and railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, and he decided to use some of that wealth to build a house in Asheville. He ended up with Biltmore -- the largest private home in America. Today it's a historic site open to the public. The entrance fee is $32, and believe me, even though it is owned by descendants of Cornelius, they need the money.
George Vanderbilt read in eight languages and collected over 20,000 books. The library, his favorite room, contains a hidden door that leads to a spiral staircase to the guest rooms, making it easy for Vanderbilt or his guests to enter the library without passing through the main part of the house, take a book, meet fellow bibliophiles and return to their rooms unnoticed. There are guided tours of all the major rooms in the home, as well as the grounds, all well worth your time.
Biltmore was the most impressive, but not the only, evidence that Appalachia had been discovered. The railroads opened up the western part of North Carolina, and travelers came in during the summer trying to escape the unhealthy conditions in the cities. Tuberculosis was the plague of the time and people felt that clean mountain air and recreation would help protect them.
One of the people who came to Asheville to get away from summer in the city was Edwin Wiley Grove. Grove was a pharmaceutical manufacturer from St. Louis who made a fortune selling Grove's Patented Tasteless Chill Tonic, the first successful use of powdered quinine in a liquid form. Grove arrived in 1898 and immediately saw an opportunity for a real estate project.
Asheville was far enough south to avoid the worst parts of a northern winter, but high enough in the mountains to avoid the worst parts of a southern summer. Vanderbilt's Biltmore House made Asheville into a fashionable location. Grove felt that the area was an ideal spot for a resort community. So he went to the other side of the valley, across from Biltmore, and purchased the side of a mountain.
Grove had visited the Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone National Park and believed that a similar resort would increase the value of his property. The result was the Grove Park Inn, which was constructed and furnished in a style known as American Arts and Crafts.
The Arts and Crafts Movement believed that the work of the craftsman was of paramount importance. Craftsmen aligned with the group produced every form of functional object, from jewelry to architecture, but the movement always had a special interest in household furnishings. The ornate style of the Victorian was rejected in favor of uncluttered lines. The Grove Park Inn was built by people working in the Arts and Crafts Movement, and today the inn has one of the most important and well-preserved collections of their work.
Dave Tomsky, director of communications for Grove Park, gave me a tour of the property. "What people really love about the inn, initially, is its magnificent setting," he began. "We're not in a parking lot in an urban environment; we're in a residential area with magnificent views of Asheville and the surrounding mountains. Then, once they get inside, into the Great Hall, they see our Arts and Crafts legacy. We have the Roycroft grandfather clock, made specifically for the Grove Park Inn. It's 8 feet tall, and its scale would overwhelm a room any smaller than the Great Hall. We have copper, hand-hammered chandeliers that are designed to reflect light off our concave ceilings for a feeling of warmth. And finally, at either end of the Great Hall, we have the two huge fireplaces -- 12 feet wide, 6 feet high and 6 feet deep, burning 10-foot logs. That's pretty impressive."
Because the people in the mountains were so poor, they made all of the objects for their homes themselves, but the quality of the workmanship made those objects works of art. Eventually a group of people came together and figured out how to turn the work into businesses.
One result was an organization called the Southern Highland Craft Guild at the Blue Ridge Parkway's Folk Art Center. This now has about 700 members who live in the mountains of nine Southern states; about 300 are represented in its Allanstand Crafts Shop. About 300,000 people visit the shop each year. You can go home with something for $7 or $7,000; either way, the quality will be outstanding.
Another organization for local craftsmen is Handmade in America. It is a nonprofit group dedicated to making western North Carolina a center for handmade objects. This group has put together a program called Cultural Heritage Trails that directs tourists to private studios, shops and galleries that only sell American crafts of the region -- I used their guidebook and map to find Robert Steffan, a well-respected glass blower with a studio in North Asheville.
I also paid a visit to the home of Diane Mostrom and Fred Chase, who are weavers. Mostrom was weaving a cotton rainbow baby blanket that I ended up sending to my daughter for future reference. The extraordinary thing about this program is that it puts you into the workrooms of the artists. You can see what they are doing and find out why. You end up with a better understanding of the works and the people who created them -- a totally different experience from the sterility of a gallery.
From the very beginning, lovers of nature were attracted to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Over the years the region has become a center for mountain sports. Some of the activities are what you'd expect, canoeing along mountain rivers, whitewater rafting and mountain biking, but Lance Hardcastle introduced me to a mountain adventure that took me by surprise.
Lance runs a llama-trekking business, East Fork Llamas, that offers trips into the woods on 60 private acres in Madison County. They load their llamas with specially designed pack systems and panniers, and fill those with gourmet food. You trek off into the woods and lunch.
Hardcastle told me, "One of the reasons we're excited about doing this is because it makes the hiking-camping-wilderness experience more accessible to everybody. There are people that are older, or maybe they're not in good shape, or maybe they have some sort of special needs or some sort of physical disability that would keep them from being able to carry a pack to get out into the woods, so that's where the llamas help out."
The llamas are some of the more recent immigrants to arrive in Appalachia, but the most influential group were known as "Ulster Scots." During the 1700s over 250,000 of them immigrated to North America. North Carolina reminded many of them of their homes in Scotland and they settled here. Among the things they brought were ancient traditions in music and dance.
Laura Boosinger is one of North Carolina's most talented singers and instrumentalists. Her husband, Timmy Abell, is a national concert performer, recording artist and songwriter. If you get to Asheville, keep an eye out for their traditional Southern Appalachian Mountain music concerts -- bluegrass is something that came along later and is considered more commercial. Bluegrass developed during the 1930s; mountain music came in with settlers from Scotland, Ireland and England.
Boosinger has a great knowledge of local music history and told me why the violin was always central to the music. "You have to think about what you could bring on a ship coming over here. It had to be something pretty small. And of all the things you could carry, the violin was the most social instrument; it was used for dancing, it was used for parlor music and it was easily transported. And there's an interesting correlation between violins and banjos, because banjos came here from Africa. You can just picture Thomas Jefferson's plantation -- African slaves playing banjos and Thomas Jefferson fiddling."
I agree with Boosinger. These days it's easy to picture Thomas Jefferson fiddling around, especially during a long weekend holiday in Asheville.
