Tag: asheville

Lucky Strike Means… Fine Public Schools?

“At the Asheville, N.C., City College last fortnight Dean Henry Dexter Learned gave students, including girls, permission to smoke in the college building between classes. An outraged Board of Education planned to oust Dr. Learned…. The Dean calmly explained: ‘If nobody smoked cigarets what would happen to the public school system of North Carolina? This is the biggest cigaret producing state in the Union.’

“The pedagogs did not heed this economic plea [and] voted to dismiss the Dean….”

— From Time magazine, Aug. 12, 1929

Kingsolver’s ‘perfect’ setting: ’40s Asheville

In addition to Mexico, why did you choose Asheville, North Carolina as a main location for this story?

“In the early months as I laid out the plot, I cast around for a setting for the U.S. portion of my story: a medium-sized city within a day’s drive of Washington, whose history I could research thoroughly.  My character would live there throughout the 1940s, so it would be ideal for me to find a city that had preserved a lot of architecture from that era, both public and private.  I would love to find intact neighborhoods, downtown blocks, grand old resorts, preserved WPA road systems and parks, all kinds of places where I could walk around and visualize my setting down to its finest details.  Asheville was perfect, just a couple of hours from where I live.

“Because it’s an old resort town, its history is very well documented in words and pictures.  The city’s unique story became its own contribution to the novel.  I discovered, for example, that in the summer of 1948 Asheville had the worst polio epidemic in the nation, putting the whole town under quarantine.  I learned this during my research and it became a key plot element, creating a perfect, claustrophobic backdrop to the suspenseful narrowing down of choices for my protagonist.  I love this fantastic synergy between discovery and creation, in writing historical fiction.  It feels like magic.”

— From an interview with Barbara Kingsolver about her historical novel “The Lacuna.”

Holiday link dump: Anarchists to preservationists

— The Asheville Citizen-Times offers a nicely done page of local historical photos. A 1943 shot raises the question: Might there also have been a Colored Transportation Co., or was that purpose adequately served by the back of the White Transportation bus?

— Also in the Citizen-Times: lots and lots of coverage of May Day vandalism. And here an anarchist calls for “Solidarity with the accused!”

— Preservationists set their sights on Edenton’s grand but neglected Pembroke Hall, circa 1850.

— Lincoln County Historical Association impatiently  bypasses state historical marker process to honor former Air Force chief of staff.

— Does Penderlea, the Pender County farm community created under the New Deal,  belong on the National Register of Historic Places?

— Archives and History publishes 25th anniversary update of  “Native Carolinians: The Indians of North Carolina.”

— High school teacher researches  “a non-fiction memoir of the 33 mills that were once in Richmond County and the people they affected.”

— The Woolworth’s lunch counter at the National Museum of American History is the setting for a half-hour play, in which an activist of the time briefs potential recruits in nonviolent resistance. (Scroll down.)

Remembering an early ear on civil rights

Death noted: Asheville native Jim Leeson, civil-rights-era journalist, May 3 in Franklin, Tenn. He was 79.

The New York Times obit centers on his historically-invaluable taping of a 1951 radio broadcast describing the scene at a black man’s public execution in Laurel, Miss., but a fuller account of Leeson’s life can be found at A Man in Full: Jim Leeson, 1930-2010.

Hat tip to blogger Tom Wood for verifying his friend’s Buncombe County roots.