 Asheville is a city in Buncombe County, North Carolina, and is its county seat. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 68,889. It is the largest city in western North Carolina, and continues to grow. As of 2006, the Census Bureau estimates that Asheville's population is 72,789 . Asheville is a part of the four-county Asheville metropolitan statistical area, the population of which was estimated by the Census Bureau in 2006 to be 398,009.
Before the arrival of Europeans, the land where Asheville now exists lay within the boundaries of Cherokee country. In 1540, Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto came to the area, bringing the first European visitors in addition to European diseases which seriously depleted the native population. As the Cherokee were eventually dominated by European settlers, the area was used as an open hunting ground until the middle of the 19th century.
The history of Asheville, as a town, begins in 1784. In that year Colonel Samuel Davidson and his family settled in the Swannanoa Valley, redeeming a soldier's land grant from the state of North Carolina. Soon after building a log cabin at the bank of Christian Creek, Davidson was lured into the woods by a band of Cherokee hunters and killed. Davidson's wife, child and female slave fled on foot to Davidson's Fort (named after Davidson's father General John Davidson) 16 miles away.
In response to the killing, Davidson's twin brother Major William Davidson and brother-in-law Colonel Daniel Smith formed an expedition to retrieve Samuel Davidson's body and avenge his murder. Months after the expedition, Major Davidson and other members of his extended family returned to the area and settled at the mouth of Bee Tree Creek.
The United States Census of 1790 counted 1,000 residents of the area, excluding the Cherokee. The county of Buncombe was officially formed in 1792. The county seat, named Morristown in 1793, was established on a plateau where two old Indian trails crossed. In 1797 Morristown was incorporated and renamed Asheville after North Carolina Governor Samuel Ashe.
[edit] The Civil War
Asheville, with a population of approximately 2,500 by 1861, remained relatively untouched by the Civil War, but contributed a number of companies to the Confederate States Army, and a substantially smaller number of soldiers to the Union.[citation needed] For a time an Enfield rifle manufacturing facility was located in the town. The war came to Asheville almost as an afterthought, when the "Battle of Asheville" was fought in early April 1865 at the present-day site of the University of North Carolina at Asheville, with Union forces withdrawing to Tennessee after encountering resistance from a small group of Confederate senior and junior reserves and recuperating Confederate soldiers in prepared trench lines across the Buncombe Turnpike; orders had been given to the Union force to take Asheville only if this could be accomplished without significant losses.[citation needed]
An engagement was also fought later that month at Swannanoa Gap as part of the larger Stoneman's Raid, with Union forces retreating in the face of resistance from Brig. Gen. Martin, commander of Confederate troops in Western North Carolina, but returning to the area via Howard's Gap and Henderson County.[citation needed] In late April 1865 troops under the overall command of Union Gen. Stoneman captured Asheville.[citation needed] After a negotiated departure, the troops nevertheless subsequently returned and plundered and burned a number of Confederate supporters' homes in the town.[citation needed] The years following the War were a time of economic and social hardship in Buncombe County, as throughout most of the defeated South.[citation needed]
[edit] 1900's to present
While Asheville prospered in the 1910s and 1920s, the Great Depression hit Asheville quite hard. Most of Asheville's banks closed. The 'per capita' debt held by the city (through municipal bonds) was the highest of any city in the nation. Rather than default, the city paid those debts over a period of 50 years. From the start of the Depression through the 1980s, economic growth in Asheville was slow. During this time of financial stagnation, most of the buildings in the downtown district remained unaltered. This resulted in one of the most impressive, comprehensive collections of Art Deco architecture in the United States.
Heavy rains from the remnants of Hurricane Frances and Hurricane Ivan caused major flooding in Asheville in September 2004, particularly at Biltmore Village.
In 2003, Centennial Olympic Park bomber Eric Robert Rudolph was transported to Asheville from Murphy, North Carolina for arraignment in federal court.
Asheville has adopted at least two nicknames over its history:
- The Land of the Sky, based on a book of the same name written by Frances Fisher Tieran (nom de plume Christian Reid).
- The Paris of the South (also used by New Orleans, Louisiana and Charleston, South Carolina).
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