Caching & Sightseeing in Asheville 3/18-19/2009

Wednesday we drove into Asheville to do some caching as it was a lovely warm sunny day. Our first cache was in a Staples parking lot, the second cache was in the parking lot of a eclectic grocery store, third was a cache at the Asheville Welcome Center, our fourth was a cache located in a paper box across from the Welcome Center, fifth was a cache in a small park in the middle of the city which was a nano on a wooden bridge, and sixth was a cache on a park bench in a tiny park behind the shoe store the cache was named for. The seventh cache we did was a virtual cache outside the Asheville Community Theater where we had to find a piece of sculpture named "On the Move" which was placed in memory of Eugene Coston Sawyer 1871-1966 and he was a automotive pioneer. They had a generator hooked up so when you turn it on it plays sounds from everything on the face of the sculpture.
Our eighth cache was located in front of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial House and had 29 rooms. Thomas Wolfe left an indelible mark on American letters. This home was his mother's boardinghouse and has become one of literature's most famous landmarks. Named "Old Kentucky Home" by a previous owner, Wolfe immortalized the rambling Victorian structure as "Dixieland" in his epic autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel. A classic of American literature, Look Homeward, Angel has never gone out of print since its 1929 publication, keeping interest in Wolfe alive and attracting visitors to the setting for this great novel. Thomas Clayton Wolfe, the youngest of eight children, was born October 3, 1900, at 92 Woodfin Street in Asheville. His father, William Oliver Wolfe (1851-1922), was descended from hardy Pennsylvania German-English-Dutch farmers; his mother, Julia Elizabeth Westall Wolfe (1860-1945), was a third-generation North Carolinian of Scots-Irish-English stock. Surprisingly, Julia Wolfe did not operate the boardinghouse because of financial need. W. O. Wolfe made enough money from the tombstone shop he owned and operated on Asheville's city square to support the family. But former teacher Julia was obsessed with the real estate market and used profits from the boardinghouse's operation to buy more property. A shrewd and hard-nosed businesswoman, Julia Wolfe was remembered as a "driver of hard bargains" by family members. The Queen Anne-influenced house was originally only six or seven rooms with a front and rear porch when it was constructed in 1883 by prosperous Asheville banker, Erwin E. Sluder. By 1889, additions had more than doubled the size of the original structure, but the architecture changed little over the next 27 years. In Look Homeward, Angel Thomas Wolfe accurately remembered the house he moved into in 1906 as a "big cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty, high-ceilinged rooms." In 1916, Wolfe's mother enlarged and modernized the house, adding electricity, additional indoor plumbing, and 11 rooms. Today the boardinghouse where Thomas Wolfe spent his childhood and adolescence feature furnishings that evoke the daily routine of life in both fact and fiction. In Wolfe's second novel, Of Time and the River (1935), 14 years before the "Old Kentucky Home" became a memorial, Wolfe already had intuitively assessed the house's true importance. He said his mother's "old dilapidated house had now become a fit museum." It is preserved almost intact with original furnishings arranged by family members very much the way it appeared when the writer lived there. Memories, kept alive through Wolfe's writings, remain in each of the home's 29 rooms. Thomas Wolfe was perhaps the most overtly autobiographical of this country's major novelists. His boyhood at 48 Spruce Street shaped his work and influenced the rest of his life. So frank and realistic were his reminiscences that Look Homeward, Angel was banned from Asheville's public library for over seven years. Today Wolfe is celebrated as one of Asheville's most famous citizens, and his boyhood home has become a part of our nation's literary history. Of Time and the River was a continuation of Look Homeward, Angel and Wolfe's last two major novels (published posthumously), The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940), followed the events of his life in New York and Brooklyn, his wandering travels through Europe, his success as a novelist, and his final sad revelation of "you can't go home again." Thomas Wolfe died in the prime of his life of tubercular meningitis on September 15, 1938, 18 days short of his 38th birthday. He is buried in Riverside Cemetery. Wolfe's mother lived in the "Old Kentucky Home" until her death in 1945. Four years later her surviving sons and daughters sold the house to a private organization, the Thomas Wolfe House Memorial Association, and it opened to the public as a house museum on July 19, 1949. The association continued to operate the memorial until 1958, when it was taken over by the City of Asheville. On January 16, 1976, the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources acquired the property. It's now a North Carolina State Historic Site.
Ninth cache was an Earthcache where we had to visit 3 different locations and get information and some pictures from each site and email them to the cache owner and post the pictures on the cache page. The first stop was the THE Colburn Earth Science Museum which is the legacy of Burnham Standish Colburn, engineer, bank president, and rockhound. His collection of rocks, gems, and minerals has been on display at various locations around Asheville since 1960. The collection has grown and expanded over the decades, and now includes exhibits on astronomy, gemology, geology, meteorology, mineralogy, oceanography and paleontology. It has been located at the Pack Place Education, Arts & Science Center since 1992. We had to go into the mine explosion demonstration use the dynamite exploder/blasting box and enter the mine and find the names of the four gems/minerals/rocks mentioned. Next stop was The City Building of Asheville which was designed by internationally known architect Douglas Ellington, and constructed in 1926-1928, the City Building of Asheville (aka "City Hall") is a great example of Art Deco architecture. As you enter the elevator lobby you will see gray marble along the walls. Pay close attention to these York Fossil slabs as they are examples of stylolytic limestone. This occurs when a large section of limestone dissolves leaving much of the non-limestone material in place. You are looking for lines that look like they were produced by a seismograph during an earthquake. Here we had to take a picture of these lines with our GPS in the picture. The third stop was at The Central United Methodist Church which was built in 1837, this imposing limestone church presents Romanesque Revival style massing and forms, but the detailing more closely reflects the Gothic Revival style. As you look at the limestone blocks the church was built of we could see a great example of bryozoans -- tiny colonial animals that generally build stony skeletons of calcium carbonate, superficially similar to coral. There are about 5,000 living species, with several times that number of fossil forms known. It is only a few square inches in size and looks like a small piece of lace. Here we had to also take a picture of a bryozoans with our GPS in it.
Our last cache was another virtual in the downtown area adjacent to the Federal Building. It was at Albert Paley's 1995 steel sculpture "Passion" which soars thirty seven feet above the plaza. Paley has been an active artist for more than thirty years, and his site-specific projects are found in the collections of major museums and in public spaces across the country. He also is a distinguished professor in contemporary crafts at the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York. Then it was on back to the coach, lunch, an afternoon of watching TV, and then dinner.
Thursday Mom and I left Muffy and Raggs at the coach ans we drove into Asheville and a visit to Biltmore Village. Biltmore Village, located across from the entrance to Biltmore Estate, is home to more than 40 unique shops and 10 cafes and restaurants. Most of the businesses are housed in historic cottages and buildings and they have tree-lined streets, brick sidewalks and period architecture. Biltmore Village is a classic planned community, constructed in the late 1890s at the entrance to the Biltmore Estate. Originally designed as a picturesque residential prelude to the Estate, the Village recreates the quaint atmosphere of an English community. The streets are laid out in a fan shape. Most of the streets are short, terminating at the outer edge of the "fan," giving the Village a geographically self-contained design. The diagonal streets were designed to emphasize depth and create sight lines between focal points of the Village - the Biltmore Depot, the Catherdral of All Souls Episcopal Church and the Estate entrance. Construction of Biltmore Village took place between 1897-1905, and the cottages were occupied as rental units beginning in 1900. Biltmore Village was declared a historic area and a local historic district in 1989. Mom enjoyed looking in all the shops as we walked around. We did do a cache along our walk, well at least part of a multi-cache where we had to get information from 5 spots to calculate the coords for the final location. We got the final coords and will look for the final in a few days as it was about 3 miles from the village. The highlight of my part of the trip was seeing the All Souls Church which has much history behind it. The Cathedral of All Souls in Asheville is a parish church that became the Cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Western North Carolina on January 1, 1995. All Souls, established in 1896 as a member of the Diocese of Western North Carolina, is part of the Episcopal Church in the United States, one Province within the worldwide Anglican Communion of seventy million souls. A Cathedral is a parish church in which the Bishop, the chief pastor and leader of a diocese, has his seat or chair - "cathedra" in Latin. All Souls Church was conceived as a congregation and a building by George Vanderbilt, developer of the Biltmore Estate and Biltmore Village, to be the central focus of the village. The Church and Parish Hall, designed by Richard Morris Hunt, were completed in 1896 and consecrated on November 8th of that year. The style of the main church building is from the Norman period of transition from Romanesque to Gothic. The basic plan is cruciform (cross shaped), using proportions of the Greek cross, which features a short nave or main body of the room. The design is said to be inspired by abbey churches in Northern England, though the apse, or semi-circular chancel, is characteristic of churches in Southern France. Originally, all the windows were mouth blown, hand leaded translucent glass such as those seen today in the Parish Hall. The windows in the chancel and nave were replaced by memorial windows of stained opalescent glass; all were designed and made by David Maitland Armstrong and his daughter, Helen, contemporaries of Tiffany. The six memorial windows in the transepts depict scenes from the Bible; they and the windows in the chancel and those facing the front porch were given in the late 1890's and the early 1900's. The tower windows are memorials and dedications that have been given over the years, the last three being installed in 1996, All Souls Centennial. The pulpit canopy, the first addition to the design, was added in 1947. A second altar was constructed at the chancel steps and the chancel was rearranged in 1990. The chancel organ, installed in 1971 by the Casavant Organ Company of Canada, is composed of three manual divisions and pedal. The older antiphonal organ over the front door contains a composite of older pipe work including a four-foot flute rank saved from the original 1896 Geo. S. Hutchings Organ. The chancel and antiphonal organs together comprise fifty five ranks with almost three thousand pipes in six divisions--all controlled from the recently restored and updated three manual console located in the chancel. The pulpit, lectern, high altar, bishop's chair, chancel furniture, pews, baptismal font in the northwest room, and the kneeling cushions are all original. Many cushions have needlepoint covers designed and stitched by parishioners and friends as memorials and thanksgivings done from the late 1960's to the present. Festival banners also were designed and executed by parishioners. Marianne Zabriskie, the late wife of the first dean of the cathedral, Cornelius A. Zabriskie, designed the cross atop the church tower. It was installed in 1961, soaring ten feet above the red tiles and it consists of two Celtic crosses. In 1977, the first bell was installed at All Souls. In 1998, a set of Westminster Peal Bells was installed alongside the original bell. These were produced by The van Bergen Company of Charleston, South Carolina. After our walk we had lunch at The Corner Kitchen a lovely small restaurant that had a very different menu. Seeing as it was kind of Mom's day this was her choice. I had a roast beef sandwich and she had a grilled portabello mushroom on toasted bread. Then it was on back to the coach after stopping at WalMart for some groceries and to get the oil changed in the car. Once we got back Mom took the dogs for a walk and I got caches ready for the next day and that was about it for the day. Well until next time we love you and miss you all. Mom & Dad