11-02/03-2023: Asheville and Christyland

After our wonderful day yesterday at the Biltmore Estate on Wednesday, we spent some time touring around Asheville. Nestled between the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains, Asheville is best known for outdoor recreation, hospitality, artsy residents and a robust music scene. it is a very eclectic city and has several nicknames, including Land of the Sky, for its incredible mountain vistas, Beer City, for its numerous breweries and beer festivals throughout the year, Paris of the South, both because of the Biltmore Estate and for world class, food, art and architecture, Dog City, USA, because it is dog-friendly and has a canine welcome center, and San Francisco of the East, because of its hip vibe, entrepreneurial spirit and art.

View of the city – borrowed from an Asheville website

We started our day at the Asheville (shortened to AVL) Visitor Center, probably the best visitor center we’ve ever visited. It was airy and spacious, packed with information and very helpful staff. It was also the starting point for the Hop on Hop Off bus tour. We opted for the entire tour route, with no getting off, so that we could get the full lay of the land. It is about a 90-minute route and our driver/guide was fantastic and very funny.

AJ – our fantastic trolley guide

While the city was founded in the late 1700s, its development as a destination city wasn’t until the early 1900s. Certainly, the creation of the Biltmore Estate was a draw, but the mountain air became a health draw and there was development of hospitals and sanitariums, and also a psychiatric institution. Dr. Robert Carroll developed Highland Hospital. He pioneered in various treatments for mentally ill patients, including electroshock and insulin shock treatments. A number of famous people spent time at Highland Hospital, including Patsy Cline and James Taylor, but probably the most famous was Zelda Fitzgerald. F. Scott and Zelda spent a lot of time in Asheville, he at the luxurious Grove Park Inn and she at the Highland Hospital. It was at the hospital that Zelda perished in a fire along with 8 other female patients. They were locked in rooms on the top floor of the hospital and couldn’t escape.

The man who really put AVL on the map was E. W. Grove. He was a pharmaceutical entrepreneur and got famous for a malaria treatment where he mixed quinine with a sugar so that the awful tasting quinine became more easy to swallow. Even though he made his fortune in pharmaceuticals, he did not want AVL to be known as a tuberculosis sanitarium center. He wanted AVL to be come a luxury vacation destination and so he built the Grove Park Inn, a very fancy Arts and Craft hotel. Grove also was responsible for development of the downtown area in the early 1920s.

Our tour guide talked non-stop for 90 minutes and gave us quite a lot of information about AVL and its history. It was a great way to get a sense of the place.

After the tour we drove a short way into downtown Asheville. AVL has more art deco architecture than any other city except Miami. We stumbled across a great place to have lunch, The Exchange at the Restoration Hotel. It being about 2:00pm, we had the restaurant practically to ourselves. It was a very pleasant lunch in a beautiful location.

One of the famous art deco buildings is the S&W Cafeteria.

AVL has a Flat Iron building, which is now a hotel. The street name on one side of the building is Wall St. and on the other side is Battery Park Avenue. Another art deco building is the Jackson Building.

AVL is the county seat of Buncombe County. The governmental buildings for the county and City Hall are next to each other and referred to as the architectural odd couple. Both were completed in the same year, 1928. The City Building was designed in a flashy art deco style by Douglas Ellington. However, the county thought the City Building was too extravagant so they fired Ellington and hired someone else to building a more classical structure. Our tour guide commented about these two buildings saying that the City Building was the wedding cake and the County Building was the box it came in. I thought that was hilarious!

We enjoyed our time in AVL. It is located in a beautiful area and I can easily understand how people are drawn to this area. AVL is a quirky community but seems to be a happening place.

On Friday, we were making our next move, going to Brevard, NC. Because it was s short drive, we had some time to go exploring. I found out that the location of the Christy story that Christine is so taken with is about an hour north of AVL, so we decided to see what we could find of what once was referred to as Christyland. Up until about 10 years ago, some of the area around a tiny place called Del Rio would have annual Christy Fests. The Catherine Marshall 1967 book Christy was so that popular that it was made into a TV series in the 1990s. That made the story even more popular and so the mountain area around Del Rio was a tourist destination. Many of the places in the book were preserved and marked with signage so people could see the mission house and school and some of the main characters’ cabins up the hollows and in the mountains. That’s all gone now and I don’t think there are any more Christy Fests.

The drive north from AVL to Del Rio was really beautiful, but it was a curvy road up, down, and around mountains. It followed the path of the French Broad River and some of the vistas were gorgeous.

The little town of Del Rio is supposedly the town of El Plano in the TV series. Other than a couple of buildings and train tracks, there isn’t anything there. I had read that the original Christy mission chapel had been relocated to Del Rio and is now called Ebenezer Baptist Church. We didn’t see it in the little town, but we did see a sign for the church pointing down a side road, so we ventured down that road. It was a narrow, windy road and we prayed that we wouldn’t meet a car coming the other way. It seemed like miles down that road, but we finally came to another sign for the church up a short drive, and there was Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Well, the mission church was no longer visible in this more modern building, but the interesting thing was the location and getting a sense for just how rugged the hills and hollows must have been. Life was certainly difficult here, but it was a beautiful spot.

We chose to drive out a different way and saw a sign for Christy Hollow Chapel and so we turned up a single lane dirt track. We drove about a mile and it was getting kind of scary, not knowing where we were headed and on this single track. We found a place to turn around and hightailed it out of there.

So our trip to Christyland was okay, but nothing to write home about. But it was a gorgeous day and had beautiful scenery. The French Broad River is one of only a few rivers that flow north. It is very picturesque. The route back to AVL retraced our route. We had seen signs for historic Marshall so we took a quick detour to Marshall, which is the county seat. There was a lovely little park where we enjoyed a picnic lunch. I read that the townsite of Marshall is blocked on one side by the French Broad River and on all other sides by steep mountainous terrain. Madison County residents say Marshall is “a block wide, a mile long, sky high and hell deep.” That is a pretty good description.

We drove back to AVL and then on to a city south of AVL called Brevard. We’re staying in Brevard three nights. The reason we’re going to Brevard is to meet up with a friend of Christine’s who she’s only seen via Zoom and talking on the telephone, so we’re looking forward to meeting her in person.

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