What the English country town of Bath was to King George’s London, the mountain resort of Asheville (pop. 68,889) was to the pre–jet set, pre-air-conditioned Deep South. When summer heat and humidity became unbearable, the gentry headed here to stay cool while enjoying the city’s many grand hotels and elaborate summer homes.
The presence here of the world’s biggest vacation house, the Vanderbilt family’s Biltmore Estate (daily; $39; 828/274-6333 or 800/543-2961), is a testament to Asheville’s primary position in the resort pantheon. The estate now covers 8,000 acres on the south side of town, though at one time it stretched up to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Surrounded by a series of flower gardens planned in part by Frederick Law Olmsted, the estate centers on a truly unbelievable French Renaissance–style mansion built in 1895. The 250-plus rooms hold everything from a palm court and a bowling alley to Napoleon’s chess set to paintings by Renoir, Singer Sargent, Whistler, and others. Signs aplenty direct you to the estate, which stands just north of the
I-40 exit 50 off Biltmore Avenue, across from the shops and restaurants in Historic Biltmore Village, which originally housed the estate’s staff and workshops—it’s a true “model village,” designed in gothic style by Richard Morris Hunt.
The rest of Asheville can’t compete with the nouveau riche excess of the Biltmore Estate, and in fact it’s a surprisingly homespun city, with a downtown commercial district filled with 1930s-era storefronts housing thrift stores and off-beat art galleries. One truly worthwhile place to see in downtown Asheville is the nondescript old boardinghouse where author Thomas Wolfe grew up from 1900 to 1920, preserved as it was when Wolfe lived here. The rambling house, at 48 Spruce Street across from the beige modern Radisson Hotel, is officially known as the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site (daily, closed Mon. in winter; $1; 828/253-8304); unfortunately, the house suffered a major fire in 1998, but after restoration is still one of the most evocative of all American literary sites. In the details and, more importantly, in general ambience, it’s identical to the vivid prose descriptions of the house he called “Dixieland,” the primary setting of his first and greatest novel, Look Homeward, Angel. After Wolfe’s death from tuberculosis in 1938, the house was made into a shrine to Wolfe by his family, who arranged it to look as it did during his youth; one room contains his desk, typewriter, and other mementos of his life and work. An adjacent museum tells more of his story.
Two blocks south of the Wolfe memorial, where Broadway becomes Biltmore Avenue, Pack Square is the center of Asheville, surrounded by the county courthouse, the city hall, a small art museum, and the public library. This is where Thomas Wolfe’s father ran a stonecutting shop, on whose porch stood the homeward-gazing angel, now recalled by a statue standing on the square’s southwest corner.
