MS338
The North Carolina Room staff joined with North Asheville Branch Library to begin our first community-drive history project based through a Buncombe County Library Branch. Classes were held at Pack Library to instruct interested volunteers on how to interview. To date, 43 oral interviews have been taken and all transcriptions of the interviews can be viewed as PDFs attached to each interviewee’s record.
Susan Jones Waldrup was interviewed by Pat Fitzpatrick on June 5, 2017 at the Log Cabin Motor Court at 330 Weaverville Road. Susan has managed the motor court for ten years. Her father was the manager of Babe Malloy’s Drive-In on Tunnel Road. Her uncle was Babe Malloy. She recalled the A&W Root Beer, the Curb, and Homer’s Gas Station on Merrimon Avenue, as well as the Arcadia Dairy on the corner of Maney and Merrimon.
During the first Scanning Day at North Branch Library, Cissy Dendy walked in with a bag full of family photographs. It took two more scanning sessions in the North Carolina Room for us to get everything scanned. Cissy lives in the same house where she grew up at 45 Madison Avenue between Charlotte, East Chestnut and Hillside Streets. This area was the home of many of Asheville’s prominent black residents. (See “The Heart of Chestnut Hill” by Cissy Dendy, MS363.001D.) Cissy’s collection is part of the North Asheville Community History Project but it was so large in volume that it was given its own special collection number, MS363.
A special part of the North Asheville Community Project was “Ask Your Elders Night.”
Although the North Asheville Community History Project “officially” ended, we are still interested in interviewing residents. Many, many people who were interviewed mentioned having photos in their attics. PLEASE give us a chance to scan and preserve them, thereby adding to the pictorial history of a community full of rich details.
To tell the truth, Fairview residents beat North Asheville residents in getting the photos down out of the attics HANDS DOWN!
