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    Weaverville
    Weaverville
    Weaverville
    Ebook169 pages40 minutes

    Weaverville

    By Tim W. Jackson and Taryn Chase Jackson

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    About this ebook

    Native Americans, particularly the Cherokee, inhabited Western North Carolina for thousands of years prior to white settlement. Legend has it that the name Dry Ridge derived from what the natives called the area. When Michael Montraville Weaver provided the land in the 1870s, Weaversville was born. The name was changed to Weaverville a few years later. In the time since, Weaverville has slowly grown. It now offers a quaint and historic downtown, along with substantial newer commercial development on Weaver Boulevard leading to Interstate 26. With the bustling town of Asheville just a few miles down the road, Weaverville has become a haven for retirees, longtime residents, and newcomers who want the cultural offerings of Asheville and the charm of a small town.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 14, 2015
    ISBN9781439653180
    Weaverville
    Author

    Tim W. Jackson

    Tim W. Jackson's first taste of scuba diving came at the age of six when he sneaked breaths off his dad's double-hose regulator in the deep end of the pool. Later, as an ex-journalist armed with a newly-minted master's degree in English, he discovered he was qualified to be a bartender, a waiter or a PhD student. Instead he chose Secret Option D: run off to the Cayman Islands to work as a scuba instructor and boat captain by day and write fiction at night. Two decades later, he still wishes that was half as interesting as it sounds. Or even a quarter . . . Jackson is the award-winning author of the comic Caribbean novels Blacktip Island and The Secret of Rosalita Flats, as well as The Blacktip Times humor blog. His "Tales from Blacktip Island" short stories have been published in literary journals worldwide. He is currently concocting his next Blacktip Island novel and still enjoys scuba diving with his dad's old double-hose reg. Feel free to stalk Tim on his website, www.timwjackson.com, the Blacktip Times (www.blacktipisland.com) or follow himon Facebook (Tim W. Jackson) and Twitter (@timwjax). A portion of the proceeds from his stories goes to the Nature Conservancy's Coral Reef Preservation Fund.

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      Book preview

      Weaverville - Tim W. Jackson

      Carolina.

      INTRODUCTION

      The land now occupied by Weaverville was opened up to white settlers in a treaty with the Cherokee in 1792, although a few settlers had already begun to trickle into the Reems Creek area and what was preliminarily called Dry Ridge, later named Weaverville. Around that same time, Buncombe County was created from parts of Burke and Rutherford Counties. Prior to that, the Weaverville area was part of Burke County. The new Buncombe County encompassed a large part of Western North Carolina and was much larger than it is today.

      These events occurred just a few years after the American Revolution. North Carolina was one of the 13 original colonies, but most of its population (393,751, according to the 1790 US Census) was in the eastern half of the state. The West, which was basically anything west of North Carolina, was still mostly undiscovered wilderness. Consider that the population of Tennessee in 1790 was just 35,691. The Cherokee were fading from the landscape around Buncombe County, and white settlers were becoming more common.

      According to Barbara Duncan, education director of the Museum of the Cherokee in Cherokee, North Carolina, The Cherokees didn’t interact that much with new settlers. They had a very structured government and they mostly interacted with European nations, their colonies, their representatives, and licensed traders. In this process they used many bilingual interpreters, sometimes the children of Scots/British traders and Cherokee women, sometimes Cherokees who had been captured or traveled and learned English. While legend has it that the area’s name throughout most of the 1800s, Dry Ridge, came from the Cherokee, Duncan says she does not have definitive confirmation. She does say, however, that the Cherokee easily conveyed their names for places to English speakers. Also Cherokees were expert map-makers, and put their names for places on many maps in the Colonial period.

      Among those early settlers in 1787 were John Weaver and his wife, Elizabeth. The Weavers had five sons and six daughters. The eldest son, Jacob, is known as the patriarch and namesake of the Tribe of Jacob, which has been gathering annually for family reunions for more than 100 years. Jacob and his wife, Elizabeth, had seven children. The youngest son of John and Elizabeth Weaver was Michael Montraville Weaver, who gave the land to create the town of Weaverville as well as Weaverville College.

      Other early settlers included Col. David Vance Sr. and his wife, Mary Priscilla Brank, who moved to Reems Creek Valley sometime between 1785 and 1790. Their son David Jr. was father to Zebulon Baird Vance, one of the dominant politicians in North Carolina for several decades, including his term as governor during the Civil War. One of Asheville’s most notable landmarks is the Vance Monument, located in the center of town. It was erected in 1896 to honor the late politician. Vance’s maternal grandfather was Zebulon Baird, known as one of the founders of Asheville.

      The Weavers, Vances, and Bairds, among others, were slaveholding families, so those surnames have long been associated with the area’s African American residents, too. Much like the Tribe of Jacob, the Baird Family Reunion has been held annually for more than 100 years. It is one of the oldest continuous black family reunions in the state. Most multigenerational African American families in Weaverville still reside in the Hillside Community, on land once owned by the Bairds.

      In the 1830s, the Salem Campground was a popular meeting place. A conference house was built in 1836 to host the Holston Annual Conference of the Methodist Church. The building was used as a school for several years. This first church was constructed on the camp ground and used until 1890, when a new Methodist church was built on Church Street.

      The first post office was established on Reems Creek in 1850. The Blacksmer Masonic Lodge No. 170 was chartered in 1855. Schools and churches popped up as more settlers moved in. When Rev. Michael Montraville Weaver, youngest son of John Weaver, donated land to form a new village in what had been known as Dry Ridge, Weaverville was born. The town officially began in 1875 and had a splendid centennial celebration in 1975. Over the years, Weaverville has maintained its own identity. It has

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