All images copyright © by Artist Werner Willis. All rights reserved

The Road To Ashville

The Buncombe County Turnpike was the most modern North Carolina road when it was completed in 1828. It connected Greenville, Tennessee to Greenville, South Carolina, running beside the French Board River for 75 miles. The turnpike detoured from the river to make a stop in Ashville, North Carolina, thus opening up the land of sky. The wealthy plantationers from the Carolinas and Georiga often came by the road to cool off from the summer heat and relax in the peaceful mountains.

Foster Sondley, a Buncombe native, wrote of his observations of the stagecoaches arriving and departing from Asheville, "No more exhilarating scene was ever witnessed than a handsome, newly painted stagecoach drawn by four fine horses as it bursts upon us around some bend in the mountain, dashing at full gallop along a road winding its way through mountian defiles. No more inspiring sound ever greeted human ears than that of the horn of the stagecoach rushing up to a mountain station while its reverberations penetrated the deep recesses and were tossed from hill to hill in wild and weird musical cadences."