|
|
|
|
Nan K. Chase
|
Asheville: A History
|
|
Nan K. Chase, a writer and cultural historian has written numerous
articles about the western area of North Carolina, as well as other
areas of the state and region. Recently she completed a comprehensive
history of Asheville, NC that details the development of the city and
which speculates on the future of this gem of the southern Appalachians.
The insightful book, Asheville: A History, published in September
2007, delves deeply into the politics, the local culture, and the people
of Asheville and weaves an engaging story of the city from its earliest
beginnings on the Drover's Road to the not so distant future.
As a former investigative reporter for the Watauga Democrat in Boone, NC, Chase's writing style tends toward the easy and engaging journalistic narrative that won her a place in many magazines and newspapers inside and outside the state. An avid gardener, Nan has specialized in horticultural journalism. She maintains an active engagement with gardens and in nurturing native Appalachian trees and shrubs and flowers in her home gardens and has recently branched out to include vegetables and fruits in her repertoire. Her avid botanical interests have led her to articles on gardening, travel, landscape design, and horticulture. Her writing on gardening and on many other subjects has appeared in Southern Living, Better Homes and Gardens, WNC Magazine, Old House Journal, Our State, Raleigh News & Observer, The American Gardner, The Washington Post, The Azalean, Smithsonian, The New York Times, and other local and national newspapers and magazines. She is a member of American Society of Journalists and Authors, an active participant in the Blue Ridge Garden Club, and acts as chair of the Board of Governors for the Daniel Boone Native Gardens, in Boone, NC her home-town. Asheville: A History, is Nan's first book and one that demonstrates her keen eye for detailed investigative research and her enthusiasm for the richness of the western North Carolina region. Released in September of 2007, by McFarland & Co. Inc, of Jefferson, NC, Asheville is a fresh look at urban Appalachia and at the pleasures and perils of living in paradise. Richly illustrated with images taken from the Special Collections of the D. Hiden Ramsey Library's photographic holdings, and from other collections in the city and around the state, her engaging narrative captures the turbulent history of this unique and beautiful urban center. Like the gardens with which she is so familiar, Asheville's growth also demonstrates a very organic trajectory. The boom and bust cycles of the city, like cycles of drought, are marked by an ebb and flow in the tourist trade, the health industry, and the real estate business. Asheville, and Chase, reminds us how like a garden is the city. So too, the city is dependent on the "gardeners," those who nurture and tend the growth of this confined space we call a city. Asheville had many strong personalities who helped to build and, at times, undermine the progress of what has become one of the finest destinations for travel and for retirement in the nation, -- and some would claim, in the world. Like the story of a garden run amuck, Asheville fell into tough times in the years preceding and during the Great Depression, and the story of the decline and the later urban re-development is handled deftly and sensitively by Chase. She tells the captivating story of urban development, decline, and re-development through the city's well-known monuments and events, and some not-so-well-known structures and events. The Grove Park Inn, Biltmore Estate, Battery Park Hotel, the Blue Ridge Parkway, Julia Wolfe's My Old Kentucky Home, the Flood of 1916, the Great Depression, the failure of Asheville's banks, the divisive urban re-development of southside Asheville and the lasting scars of racial segregation are well researched and analyzed. The creative and entrepreneurial genius of E.W. Grove, Fred Seely, George W. Vanderbilt, Douglas Ellington, Richard Sharp Smith, Col. Frank Coxe, George W. Pack, and more recently, Julian Price, and others, fill the pages with captivating stories of large personalities each asserting their place in the city. Some of these personalities struggled to shape, nurture and at times dominate the landscape of this unique city with their vision or their ego. Nan is not sparing in her criticism of the wrong-turns made by the city, by the city's leaders or by its populace at large. She tackles the issues of race relations, economic mismanagement, urban blight, petty politics, urban sprawl, re-development, and other human foibles with a clear and informative mindfulness that encourages debate and on-going dialogue. For those who read Asheville, many will be encouraged to go back to her earlier journalism. Like the garden she knows so well, Nan Chase asks us to take care as we cultivate and care for our garden-city. Like a large biography, Asheville, gives us a living city that swells with pride like an over-indulged child, that struts its stuff like a pre-adolescent, and that whines and sulks like a deprived and temperamental adolescent as the money falls away, but that strides back as a mature and progressive adult. Like good biography, this book brings the reader to see those parts of self and city that are both admirable and not so admirable and in doing so, helps us to appreciate community in all its diversity. Two other books by Chase are soon scheduled for publication . One, a co-authored work, will explore bark house design and the other, Edible Landscapes, returns the author to her favorite and intimate topic, nature and more specifically, the garden. Asheville: A History
|
|
|
Sources: Vertical Files, UNCA Special Collections ; the author |
|
