What George Vanderbilt Saw: Asheville and the Western North Carolina Mountains in 1887 – 88: Lecture by Dan Pierce

Legend has it that either on his first visit to Asheville in 1887 or on his second visit with his mother in 1888, George Vanderbilt gazed south from the veranda of the Battery Park Hotel and picked out the site for his estate and palatial chateau at the confluence of the Swannanoa and French Broad Rivers. But Vanderbilt also spent time on those two trips exploring the booming city of Asheville and its surrounding mountains. This talk will take you along with Vanderbilt as he explored a city and the countryside in the midst of rapid transformation prompted by the arrival of the Western North Carolina Railroad in1880. During the short interval between 1880 and 1887-88, Asheville’s population doubled and outsiders like Frank Coxe, the builder/proprietor of the Battery Park, brought new energy to the once sleepy “cow town” which soon began to characterize itself as “The Paris of the South.” Vanderbilt also made forays into the mountains on exploring and hunting trips taking in the spectacular scenery of what local-color author Francis Tiernan termed the “Land of the Sky,” but at a time when it was on the cusp of transformation by industrial logging also brought by the railroad.

OLLI Reuter Center Rm. 102 on the campus of UNC-Asheville

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