Asheville’s First Public Schools For Blacks For more than a year, I have collected every newspaper article on the Beaumont Academy, Beaumont School and the Mountain Street School, in my quest to gather information on the first public schools for blacks in Asheville. But something puzzled me – where was the original location of the
This post begins the two-part story of Edward Stephens and his work in Asheville and other cities. Although Stephens wasn’t one of the original five black teachers when the Asheville public schools opened in January 1888, he came to the system two years later and made lasting contributions to the black community as a teacher,
This installment offers a look at the life and career of the fifth of the five original teachers at Asheville’s first black city school, Beaumont Street. We’ve saved one of the best teachers for last. We’ve also included information on the members of her family because of their prominence in Asheville and their connections to
I remember “worst” Asheville. It’s the neighborhood where my Grandfather was born in a house with dirt floors, where I went to preschool (back when Crossroads Assembly was “West Asheville Assembly” located on Haywood Rd.), attended my first dance lessons (in the building where Asheville Greenworks is today), and went along with my mother to
Henry Robinson wrote in 1992 about his childhood community of Southside–a mournful eulogy really, to a place that no longer exists–that the sprawling community “stretched over 400 acres from Biltmore Avenue westward to the French Broad River.” Robinson informs us today that it was “the largest residential area for African-Americans in Asheville and a melting
In our last post in this series on early black public schools, we looked at the lives and careers of Harrison B. Brown and Daniel Cato Suggs, two of the original five teachers who opened Beaumont School on January 9, 1888. This new post profiles two more of these teachers, Edward H. Lipscombe and Mary
The Creation of a Public School System for the City of Asheville, 1887-1888 Setting Up the System and Hiring the Teachers Asheville Times, July 29, 1887: “Graded School Carried: Asheville Keeps to the Front By a Very Close Squeeze” “We need not multiply words to express pleasure at the result of the election yesterday on
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 30, 2019 FROM 6:00 TO 7:00 PM LORD AUDITORIUM PACK MEMORIAL LIBRARY LOWER LEVEL THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Light Refreshments will be served “Herbert Pelton arrived in Asheville in 1905. When he left Asheville in 1930, he had become one of the best and most prolific commercial photographers