Visiting Our Past: Vance monument, an old cabin & more

Rob Neufeld
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Editor's note: This week, columnist Rob Neufeld answers readers' questions about Asheville's history.

Question: I have been reading about the history of the Vance Monument. I have read the recent (2015) dedication. Is there a transcript of the (original 1898) dedication?

I notice that at the bottom of the current plaque on the monument, it reads “So that the future may learn from the past.” It may be more difficult to do that without the monument.

Asheville's Court Square, circa 1899, shows Vance Monument two years after it was erected, close by the sixth Buncombe County courthouse.

Answer: I don’t think you have to worry about the removal of the Vance Monument. Current discussion has to do with whether or not to put an African-American monument next to it to correct a blindness to the evil of slavery. Zebulon Vance owned slaves.

An alternate idea has been to place a monument that recognizes African-American greatness on a site that supports African-American business and culture.

When the Vance monument was dedicated on May 10, 1898 — four years after Vance’s death — there was a big ceremony.

Related column:

The Advance Monument: A proposal for Asheville’s Vance problem


The Asheville Concert Band began things with performances of “Yankee Doodle,” “Tenting on the Old Home Ground” and “Dixie.”

“Tenting on the Old Home Ground” was written in 1863 by Walter Kittredge of New Hampshire. He was sick of seeing dead young men on fields.

“Many are the hearts that are looking for the right to see the dawn of peace,” the instantly popular song went. (See the YouTube video, “Tenting Tonight Civil War Music Video.”)

Tennessee Gov. Robert Love Taylor gave the speech at the dedication. He went on about Vance’s great sense of humor and love of people, emphasizing how that made Vance a great statesman, and hardly mentioning Vance’s military and political history.

“When I was a barefooted boy, romping among the hills of Tennessee,” Taylor related, “the news of the fame” of Vance’s rhetorical triumphs rippled “into the peaceful homes of our people. The boys heard his yarns and rolled on the floor in merriment.”

Sen. Vance, Taylor continued, was “the great laugh producer and side-splitter of the South.”

Vance, born in Reems Creek, had been North Carolina’s governor during the Civil War and U.S. senator from 1880 until his death in 1894. He and his family had owned slaves.

He defended the South against Northern business domination, such as unfair tariffs; stood up for North Carolina against Confederate infringements on state law, such as suspension of habeas corpus; put forward progressive reforms for laborers and farmers; and championed Jewish people in his paper, “The Scattered Nation.”

When Taylor finished with his folksy eulogy, the first person to shake his hand was George Willis Pack, the Northern lumberman who had moved to Asheville and made many gifts to the city.

Pack had supplied $2,000 of the $3,300 for the monument. In 1903, he would provide land for a new county courthouse, and Public Square would be renamed Pack Square.

Question: I enjoyed your recent article about Arthur Murray! What were your sources of information regarding Edith Vanderbilt?

Answer: Here’s the killer. Some of my stories about Mrs. Vanderbilt came from Arthur Murray’s daughter, Jane Heimlich, with whom I met in 2003. I have not yet found my notes from that. They’re somewhere! Thank you for inspiring me to go through my boxes of “to be filed.”

At any rate, the stories relating to Vanderbilt regarding Murray’s moustache, the dance exhibition request and the partner match-making came from Heimlich. (Her second visit, by the way, was with her husband, Dr. Henry Heimlich, the inventive physician, who died last year. Jane died in 2012, three years after she published her life-with-father book, “Out of Step.”)

My note about Vanderbilt directing people to give to the war effort — that’s from the day’s newspaper. And the call to the bootlegger when someone ruined the mint juleps with dairy ice, that came from an interview I had with Jane Bingham.

I often mention sources in my writing, but I must have made a judgment call as I cribbed from myself, cut things out for a shorter version, and did not leave a good trail.

This day and age, I think historians and reporters have to be more scrupulous than ever. “Show me your sources!” should be a battle cry.

Question: The property at 1773 Old Haywood Road includes a log cabin purported to have been built in 1873 by the first woman to own property in North Carolina. What is the history?

Answer: There are four directions to go in researching this: printed sources triggered by the address, site archaeology, local knowledge and deeds.

Deeds are a dodgy thicket. The existing deed for the property, about 22 acres near the Asheville School, came from Artisan House, a development company that formed in 1997 and then bought lots from people who owned land in the 1926 subdivision, Sulphur Springs Park, and another piece that Simpson Snow Norman bought from William A. Hawkins in 1869.

W.A. Hawkins was born in Buncombe County in the second year of its existence and was the son of Benjamin Hawkins, who owned a plantation on the site of the present-day Biltmore Estate Winery.

Sulphur Springs Park drew up its first plat in 1914. To get back to 1873, through its corporate dealings, would take some work.

If the cabin that survives dates to 1873, and if it existed on what had been the Hawkins piece, then looking into Simpson Snow Norman is the next step in the exploration.

I like this kind of question because it leads off the main highway of historical attention, and follows a piece of land.

Question: The government that followed Reconstruction and the removal of troops was not, as you claim, a “healing transition” but rather white domination, the humiliating Jim Crow segregation system, lynching and vicious racism.

Answer: That’s more of a gauntlet than a question, but I’ll take it as a good question.

First, I apologize that it seemed I called the post-Reconstruction period “a healing transition.” That would be some outrageous statement. What I strove to say was that there are two ways to respond to winning a war: One is reconciliation (a healing), and the other is domination and demonization.

The post-Reconstruction period was the most virulently racist period in North Carolina history. Could that have been mitigated with a Marshall-type post-war plan?

Add to the mix the general knowledge that the North had been trying to economically dominate the South since it had supplied ships for the slaves that produced the crops for Northern factories. And add to that the fact that Southern mountain families, not attached to slavery, had fought for the Confederacy to protect their homeland from invasion.

One might say that the mountain families had been duped by slavocrats, and the response would be: 1) Aren’t we all duped? and 2) The mountain people knew about Northern imperialism, and it wasn’t hard to think that abolition had not been the only Northern objective.

The discussion comes down to how we view Reconstruction: a necessary government action to protect African-Americans, a resentment-fueling opportunism or both.

Sometimes, the discussion revolves around a word choice. “Police state” is an inaccurate description of the military presence, I’m told. The distinction has to do with the characterization of it, negative or positive.

I am willing to remove the phrase “police state” and come up with a better term. I think that’s important. And it’s also important to examine how military occupations work, and what kinds of distinctions we make between them.

It’s important to see how we can right wrongs, use the power of human relations and undo divisions between antagonized groups. It’s important to see exactly how Reconstruction worked. I think we’re all together on that focus.


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