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HeardTell Blog

Casa Loma

The Asheville Art Museum opened its doors (finally!) late last year. On the left is the old Pack Library building and to the right is the newest entrance to the museum. Do you know what that corner looked like before the museum expanded or, even earlier, when it was the main entrance to the Diana
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Asheville’s First City Schools for Black Students, Part five: Builders of Black Schools (concluded)

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
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Confronting the Legacy of N.W. Woodfin: 52 Weeks, 52 Communities

The Woodfin community, like many other Buncombe County communities is named for a man who enslaved human beings. If you’ve followed along in this series, you’ve probably recognized that to be a common theme among communities; they’re named for people of extravagant wealth. Wealth earned on the backs of enslaved black people. Indeed, our county
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A “Worst” Asheville Album: 52 Weeks, 52 Communities

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
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Southside: 52 Weeks, 52 Communities

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
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Walter H. Page and His Christmas Letter To His Grandson

Who was Walter H. Page? Did you ever wonder who Page Avenue was named for? E.W. Grove named the street in his downtown development for the publisher, writer and ambassador to Great Britain during World War I, Walter Hines Page. Page was born at what is now Cary, NC in 1855. He was one of the
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