Last year, I published a “Top Ten Most Historically Resonant Local Stories” list, and a reader wrote to say my list was too obvious — even though bears were on top in a tip of the hat to their totemic status.
In some ways, I agree with the reader. Chaos theory works in wondrous ways. One can point to seemingly insignificant events that prove, through a chain reaction over a long period of time, to be fateful.
So, this year, I reach into a grab bag of untreated stories to see just how random historical significance is.
Look at that. Here’s one from 2007. On May 23 of that year, the world became more urban than rural. I’ll pick again.
1890 — another statistic. In Asheville, tobacco sales at auction totaled $500,000, 40 times as much as in 1880.
There’s something appended to it, a family scene. Burn McQueen and his brother Gib are telling their parents, Lydia and Mark, farmers, why Asheville is where it’s at.
“Why, you go to town,” Burn says, “and all you see or smell or hear talked is tobacco. … There were strangers everywhere with pockets full of money. … Porches of the freight depots were plumb overflowing with piles and piles of leaves, and there was no getting away from under the smell of it.”
The scene comes from fiction, Wilma Dykeman’s novel “The Tall Woman.” Capitalism is strong in the mountains; agrarianism is weakening. Tobacco is a part of the picture.
The historical current had also brought Samuel C. Shelton, a tobacco pioneer, from Henry County, Va., in 1868.
Before the war, Shelton had promoted the business of bright-leaf, or yellow, versus dark-leaf tobacco. A successful curing method had been discovered by a North Carolina slave named Stephen in 1839, and people were beginning to want cigarettes, which made use of bright-leaf’s milder, more aromatic smoke.
After Emancipation, labor costs made dark-leaf production unaffordable, argued Thomas P. Atkinson, a Virginia planter, in an 1868 issue of Southern Planter and Farmer. Shipping was also a problem, and the dark-leaf grower “shall be subject to the present high taxes and to all the evils consequent on free(d) labor.”
Geography guided Shelton to Western North Carolina.
“The causes which favor the production of fine tobacco,” he stated, “are the elevation of the country, the dryness of the climate by day, and the coolness and moisture of the nights. Tobacco ‘yellows’ on the hill much more readily and uniformly than in the country east of the mountains, and the curing, done by flues or coal, is effected more quickly.”
Shelton’s accomplishments come to light in J.D. Cameron’s 1881 book, “Sketch of Tobacco Interests in N.C.” Shelton’s top two broad-leaf variety picks: Oronoko and Silky Pryor.
Fraternal bonds had also drawn Shelton. In 1869, 1870, 1872 and 1874, he served as master of Mount Herman Masonic Lodge 118 in Asheville.
Is history random, or is it determined by large historical events?
Stephen, the slave, working for Caswell County planter Abisha Slade, made his discovery by accident, Martha B. Katz-Hyman and Kym S. Rice relate in their new book, “World of a Slave.”
“Stephen fell asleep tending the fire,” they write, “then stoked it high when he saw it was almost out. The burst of heat turned the leaves a bright golden color with an appealing flavor that became the hallmark of the Virginia-North Carolina Bright Leaf Belt.”
The emergence and disappearance of 1890s Asheville is another story.
In 1890, Richmond Pearson, politician and diplomat, advertised “the heart of Asheville for sale” — 104 vacant lots stretching from present-day Pritchard Park to the present-day YMI building.
Pearson had just built his new Asheville residence, Richmond Hill, north of town. He was already a force in the creation of an urban world, for, as a state legislator he ushered through a bill to fence free-ranging livestock in Buncombe County.
Today, the 1890s fall under the shadow of what is considered the golden age in Asheville history, the 1920s. But for 30 years, its downtown renaissance, as expressed in impressive Romanesque architecture, reigned before yielding to the new vision, epitomized by Douglas Ellington’s City Hall and Ronald Greene’s Jackson Building.
Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature and manages the WNC book and heritage website The Read on WNC. Contact him at [email protected] or 505-1973.
Last year, I published a “Top Ten Most Historically Resonant Local Stories” list, and a reader wrote to say my list was too obvious — even though bears were on top in a tip of the hat to their totemic status.
In some ways, I agree with the reader. Chaos theory works in wondrous ways. One can point to seemingly insignificant events that prove, through a chain reaction over a long period of time, to be fateful.
So, this year, I reach into a grab bag of untreated stories to see just how random historical significance is.
Look at that. Here’s one from 2007. On May 23 of that year, the world became more urban than rural. I’ll pick again.
1890 — another statistic. In Asheville, tobacco sales at auction totaled $500,000, 40 times as much as in 1880.
There’s something appended to it, a family scene. Burn McQueen and his brother Gib are telling their parents, Lydia and Mark, farmers, why Asheville is where it’s at.
“Why, you go to town,” Burn says, “and all you see or smell or hear talked is tobacco. … There were strangers everywhere with pockets full of money. … Porches of the freight depots were plumb overflowing with piles and piles of leaves, and there was no getting away from under the smell of it.”
The scene comes from fiction, Wilma Dykeman’s novel “The Tall Woman.” Capitalism is strong in the mountains; agrarianism is weakening. Tobacco is a part of the picture.
The historical current had also brought Samuel C. Shelton, a tobacco pioneer, from Henry County, Va., in 1868.
Before the war, Shelton had promoted the business of bright-leaf, or yellow, versus dark-leaf tobacco. A successful curing method had been discovered by a North Carolina slave named Stephen in 1839, and people were beginning to want cigarettes, which made use of bright-leaf’s milder, more aromatic smoke.
After Emancipation, labor costs made dark-leaf production unaffordable, argued Thomas P. Atkinson, a Virginia planter, in an 1868 issue of Southern Planter and Farmer. Shipping was also a problem, and the dark-leaf grower “shall be subject to the present high taxes and to all the evils consequent on free(d) labor.”
Geography guided Shelton to Western North Carolina.
“The causes which favor the production of fine tobacco,” he stated, “are the elevation of the country, the dryness of the climate by day, and the coolness and moisture of the nights. Tobacco ‘yellows’ on the hill much more readily and uniformly than in the country east of the mountains, and the curing, done by flues or coal, is effected more quickly.”
Shelton’s accomplishments come to light in J.D. Cameron’s 1881 book, “Sketch of Tobacco Interests in N.C.” Shelton’s top two broad-leaf variety picks: Oronoko and Silky Pryor.
Fraternal bonds had also drawn Shelton. In 1869, 1870, 1872 and 1874, he served as master of Mount Herman Masonic Lodge 118 in Asheville.
Is history random, or is it determined by large historical events?
Stephen, the slave, working for Caswell County planter Abisha Slade, made his discovery by accident, Martha B. Katz-Hyman and Kym S. Rice relate in their new book, “World of a Slave.”
“Stephen fell asleep tending the fire,” they write, “then stoked it high when he saw it was almost out. The burst of heat turned the leaves a bright golden color with an appealing flavor that became the hallmark of the Virginia-North Carolina Bright Leaf Belt.”
The emergence and disappearance of 1890s Asheville is another story.
In 1890, Richmond Pearson, politician and diplomat, advertised “the heart of Asheville for sale” — 104 vacant lots stretching from present-day Pritchard Park to the present-day YMI building.
Pearson had just built his new Asheville residence, Richmond Hill, north of town. He was already a force in the creation of an urban world, for, as a state legislator he ushered through a bill to fence free-ranging livestock in Buncombe County.
Today, the 1890s fall under the shadow of what is considered the golden age in Asheville history, the 1920s. But for 30 years, its downtown renaissance, as expressed in impressive Romanesque architecture, reigned before yielding to the new vision, epitomized by Douglas Ellington’s City Hall and Ronald Greene’s Jackson Building.
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