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What’s in a name? For Asheville, signs point to history of racism
City’s dilemma: Preserve? Remove? Rename? Contextualize?
BY PETER H. LEWIS AVL W ATCHDOG
Vance, Patton, Woodfin, Henderson, Weaver, Chunn, Baird — their names are familiar to anyone living in Asheville and Buncombe County today. All were wealthy and influential civic leaders honored by having their names bestowed on statues, monuments, streets, schools, parks, neighborhoods and local communities.
They were also major slaveholders or slave traders and white supremacists who amassed their wealth and influence in part through the exploitation of human beings they treated as property. Of all the slaveholders in Buncombe County, no one enslaved more African Americans than Nicholas W. Woodfin, James W. Patton and James McConnell Smith, according to census records and slave deeds.
Asheville itself was named for a major slaveholder, as was Buncombe County. The fortunes that propelled Samuel Ashe and Edward Buncombe to prominence were wrung from the suffering of hundreds of enslaved Africans on their sugar and cotton plantations.
Today, as the Black Lives Matter movement focuses national attention on racial profiling and systemic brutality against people of color, Asheville and surrounding communities are confronting what many say is a longoverdue reckoning: How should the community honor its founders while also recognizing and condemning their racism? How do we as a community choose which historical figures to venerate?
Should the names of White supremacists, slaveholders, and Confederates who fought to preserve slavery, regardless of their other civic contributions, be removed from all public spaces, roads and buildings? Local figures contacted by AVL Watchdog say opinions are mixed — sometimes emphatically so — but also worthy of reflection and debate.
“It’s not really all that complicated: We need to remove anything that symbolizes or glorifies racism or policies of hatred,” said Kevin Wilkerson, who asked to be identified as a Black citizen and activist in Asheville. “I think the vast majority of the community agrees with me.”
The Asheville City Council voted unanimously earlier this month to remove a Confederate monument at the Buncombe County courthouse, and another marker honoring Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, the Dixie Highway and Confederate Col. John Connally. A subsequent vote by the Buncombe County Commission agreed, but by a 4-to-3 vote along partisan lines.
The council also formed a joint city-county task force to consider removing or repurposing the 65-foot-tall Vance obelisk, erected to honor Zebulon Baird Vance, former Governor, Senator, Congressman, Confederate military officer and avowed White supremacist who personally enslaved six Blacks before 1865 and whose family in total held 18 in bondage.
But the Vance family’s enslavements were “modest,” one historian wrote, compared to other families in the area, especially James Washington Patton, a slave owner whose various family members kept 221 Black people in bondage.
“I further give and bequeath to my son James W. Patton the following male slaves to wit — Bob, Sam, Leope, Hardin, Felix, Austin, Peter, Anthony, John and Russel & the following female slaves to wit – Celia, Rhoda and her five children, and the future increase of the females.” — Will of James Patton, Asheville, 1845
MAJOR ROADS HONOR SLAVEHOLDERS
Reminders of the pain, sorrow and injustice infused into the city’s history are everywhere today. Take a drive along Patton Avenue, the main east-west thoroughfare through downtown, or a trip down Hendersonville Road, a major north-south corridor named for Leonard Henderson, a Supreme Court Chief Justice who owned 41 Blacks and used his position of privilege to argue against abolition.
Or up Merrimon Avenue, named for Augustus S. Merrimon, Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, who wrote that the institution of slavery was likely of “divine appointment.” Which connects to Weaverville Road, named for Michael Montraville Weaver and his wife Jane Eliza Baird Weaver, whose families collectively owned 93 enslaved people. Which takes the traveler to the town of Woodfin, whose namesake, Nicholas Washington Woodfin, was the second-largest slaveholder in all of Western North Carolina.
As in many cities in the South, it’s hard to get around Asheville without bumping into reminders of historical policies that viewed Blacks, Indigenous people, and other people of color as unworthy of the privileges granted to Whites. And as in other cities North and South, the Black Lives Matter movement has energized a debate over how best to acknowledge that history without glorifying it.
Do those reminders, including statues, street signs and even the names of towns and counties, need to be removed? Renamed? Put in context? Put in museums, instead of on public land?
“I am absolutely in favor of renaming
James W. Patton
Augustus S. Merrimon
these streets,” Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer said. “This is one of many things that can be done to further the dismantling of institutionalized racism.”
“The city is revising its street renaming process which is done through petition to make it easier for residents to petition to rename streets,” Manheimer said. “The petition process allows residents to participate in selecting the new name for the street.” But, she noted, Patton Avenue and Hendersonville Road are state roads, not city roads, and the process for renaming them is unclear.
HISTORY IN SHADES OF GRAY
To be sure, the region’s history is not simple. The individuals celebrated by monuments and street names contributed greatly to the growth of Asheville and surrounding communities, serving in government, financing schools, establishing businesses, and making other civic contributions.
But where do we draw the line? Who decides if a historical person’s legacy is too entwined with racism or oppression to allow their monuments to stand?
“I’m in favor of renaming them,” Preston Blakely, a member of the Fletcher town council in Henderson County, told AVL Watchdog. “I’m against honoring those who have problematic pasts involving the enslavement of Black people. We can see the effects of that still today. We’ve gone from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration.”
Before its name was changed in the late 1800s, Fletcher was originally named Murrayville, after Samuel Murray, the first settler, who brought 14 family members and 12 slaves with him from South Carolina.
Some people draw a distinction between historical figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves but helped build a framework for a nation dedicated to equality, and Confederate leaders, who declared war on the United States in order to preserve the institution of slavery.
Many of the monuments in the area were erected by United Daughters of the Confederacy North Carolina Division, an organization of women “who are lineal or collateral blood descendants of men and women who served honorably in the Army, Navy or Civil Service of the Confederate States of America, or who gave Material Aid to the Cause.”
The Daughters did not respond to an AVL Watchdog request for comment, but a notice atop the group’s web page admonishes “Do not remove the ancient landmark which your fathers have set. — Proverbs 22:28.”
Buncombe County Commissioner Amanda Edwards disagrees. Edwards said at a commission meeting June 16: “Removing monuments does not erase history. What it does is remove the constant visual reminder of a system that didn’t treat African Americans as equitable.”
The African American Heritage Commission of Asheville and Buncombe County is exploring options for “recontextualizing” Pack Square, where the Vance Monument stands near the spot where blackskinned men, women and children were bought and sold on the steps of the old Buncombe County courthouse.
“We acknowledge and support the positive role that recent protests have played in opening the door to real and necessary change,” the Western North Carolina Historical Association board of trustees said in a statement. Anne Chesky Smith, executive director of the association, told AVL Watchdog that the board is currently meeting to re-evaluate its operations toward a goal of better representing the diversity that has shaped the region.
UNCOMFORTABLE DISCUSSIONS
Is it possible to honor the past, without honoring parts of the past that today seem vile and odious?
“The truth is, I don’t know,” said J. Clarkson, rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Fletcher. The F
w BY PETER H. LEWIS AVL W ATCHDOG n - L B y 1860, about 15 percent of the population of Western North Carolina was enslaved. Only a small percentage of the White settlers, who had pushed - out Indigenous Native Americans, owned slaves — about 2 percent of households, according to Katherine Calhoun Cutshall, collections manager, North Carolina
Room, Pack Memorial Library — and of d t d those, most owned one or two. The majority were owned by a handful of elite families, whose names are commemorated throughout the region. n n t - They used their wealth and influence to help build Asheville and surrounding communities, supporting government, schools, healthcare, infrastructure, parks and other civic improvements, for which they were n honored. But the wealth that lifted them to prominence was derived in large part by the enslavement and exploitation of Black people, entwining their many good deeds with n the evil of racism. r d ASHEVILLE
Originally Morristown, the town was d incorporated and renamed in 1797 to honor Samuel Ashe (1725-1813), governor of North L Carolina and a major slaveowner. He never lived here. Asheland Avenue is also named for him. r The Patton family constituted the largest slaveholders in Asheville, collectively owning r t g t r n more than 220. James W. Patton (1803-1861) owned 78 in 1860 and was, with J.E. Patton and others, active in buying, selling and trading hundreds of enslaved Blacks. Patton Avenue is named for him. John Patton and Samuel Chunn were partners in a slave-trading business. Chunn has a road and a neighborhood named for him.
Asheville businessman and hotelkeeper - James McConnell Smith (1787-1856) owned 75 enslaved Blacks, some of whom built the - Smith-McDowell House, believed to be Asheville’s oldest surviving structure. It is d now headquarters of the Western North - n church was built on a former plantation and y was financed and supported by slave owners, a he said. A corner of the church property was d dedicated almost a century ago to a cluster of monuments honoring Confederate President, L slaveholder, and avowed White supremacist g Jefferson Davis, along with Zebulon Vance f and other “heroes” of the Old South. Today, the “Open-Air Westminster Abbey of the South,” as Calvary’s memorial park is known, sits near a dedicated food bank where volunteers from the church community gather and distribute food to needy famit lies. Clarkson said that even before the panm demic, and the protests, he and parishioners had already convened a series of meetings to begin wrestling with the “uncomfortable” question of how to reconcile history and current values. Carolina Heritage Center. William McDowell owned 40 slaves.
Daniel Reynolds (1809-1878), namesake of Reynolds Mountain, owned 15 slaves.
Asheville’s first merchants, brothers Zebulon and Bedent Baird, owned 14 slaves in 1820. The Baird family (Baird Cove Road) owned 36 slaves.
Augustus Summerfield Merrimon (1830- 1892), U.S. Senator and Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, wrote, “Slavery has certainly existed from the earliest times down to the present, and it would seem that it is, in one sense, of divine appointment … I am thoroughly convinced that Slavery in this country cannot be abolished without greatly endangering our country … If it is an evil in the abstract, it would be a greater evil to abolish it here.” Merrimon Avenue is named for him.
Asheville’s hotel and tourism industry, already thriving before the Civil War, was in large part based on slave labor.
BUNCOMBE COUNTY
Originally the State of Buncombe, which encompassed much of western North Carolina, it was named after Col. Edward Buncombe (1742-1778), who forced more than 100 enslaved Africans to work his sugar plantations.
In the 1860 census the Black population of Buncombe County was 13 percent, but historians note the percentage swelled in summer months as slaveholders in Georgia and South Carolina temporarily moved their families to mountain resorts.
In 1860 Zebulon Vance owned six Blacks; his brother owned seven.
William Johnston, a farmer, owned 55 slaves.
WEAVERVILLE
In 1860, U.S. census data show that the families of Michael Montraville Weaver and his wife Jane Eliza Baird Weaver, who donated the land of what is today Weaverville, collectively owned 93 enslaved people. opening for education.”
It’s a question the church — and Asheville, and Buncombe County, and the rest of the nation — will be wrestling with for quite some time.
“I’m okay with not moving quickly to a solution just because we feel uncomfortable,” Clarkson said. “It’s okay if we spend some time being uncomfortable. It’s an opening for education.”
WOODFIN
The town was named for Nicholas W. Woodfin (1810-1876), a “complicated” man who “was at best inconsistent in the application of his values,” according to the Town of Woodfin Facebook page. By 1860 Woodfin was western North Carolina’s secondlargest individual slaveNicholas W. holder, owning 122 Woodfin enslaved people. Only William F. McKesson in Burke County personally owned more, 174.
HAYWOOD COUNTY
Named for John Haywood, state treasurer for 40 years. After his death in 1827 auditors discovered $68,906.80 missing (equivalent to $1.86 million in 2020 dollars). His enslaved Blacks were sold to partially reimburse the state. His namesake county, however, had
John Haywood relatively few enslaved people in 1860; the exception was James Robert Love, proprietor of the White Sulphur Springs Resort near Waynesville, who owned 85 servants.
MADISON COUNTY
Originally inhabited by the Cherokee people, Madison County was named for James Madison (1751-1836), fourth President of the United States, who owned more than 100 slaves on his Virginia plantation and sold them for personal profit.
The Black population of Madison County in 1860 was 3.6 percent.
According to a Sept. 2, 1903, article in The Laurens (S.C.) Advertiser, African
“I’m okay with not moving quickly to a solution just because we feel uncomfortable,” Clarkson said. “It’s okay if we spend some time being uncomfortable. It’s an
— J. Clarkson, rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Fletcher
“We could make a decision about what to do with these monuments, but then we might never actually get to the deeper question of how we square that history with our current place in the community,” Clarkson said. “That would be a real loss.”
To some in Asheville, the whole debate over names and rocks and memorials is just a distraction from the real issues raised by Madison County except within a mile of the courthouse in Marshall.
The construction of Mars Hill College in Madison County was financed in part by using an enslaved Black man, Joseph Anderson, as collateral for the loan. A contractor seized Joe, and the sheriff jailed him until the school’s trustees paid the debt. Joe was freed after the Civil War. His greatgranddaughter, Oralene Anderson Simmons, in 1961 became the first African American student at Mars Hill College and is now a noted civil rights leader and activist in Asheville.
HENDERSON COUNTY
Leonard Henderson (1772-1833), one of the first Chief Justices of North Carolina, owned 41 slaves in 1830, according to the census. As Chief Justice, Henderson argued that local Quakers had no legal right to grant freedom to enslaved workers left to them in a man’s will, citing the “mischief ” it might cause if enslaved Blacks saw free Blacks getting paid for their work. “Numerous collections of slaves,” Henderson wrote, “working for their own benefit, in the view and under the continual observation of others who are compelled to labour for their owners, would naturally excite in the latter, discontent with their condition, encourage idleness and disobedience, and lead possibly in the course of human events to the most calamitous of all contests, a bellum servile” (slave war).
By 1860 the Black population of Henderson County was 15 percent.
YANCEY COUNTY
In the 1820 census Bartlett Yancey, U.S. congressman and speaker of the North Carolina state Senate, is recorded as owning 36 slaves. In the Yancey family Bible he recorded the “Family Record of the Age of Negro Children” born to his slaves; There are 131 births listed from 1810 to 1864.
Black Lives Matter.
“That’s not a discussion I want anything to do with. I have no interest in that at all,” said DeWayne Barton, founder and chief executive of Hood Huggers International in Asheville, an organization dedicated to strengthening systematically marginalized neighborhoods in the region. “A monument, a street name, a flag, none of that means anything to me. Nothing. What matters is, what are we going to do about now, right now, about the current physical brutality against the Black community?”
