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  #41  
Old Posted Dec 29, 2011, 11:35 PM
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Extremely interesting. Thanks for showing us this place.
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  #42  
Old Posted Dec 30, 2011, 12:29 AM
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Awesome thread. That video was pretty sweet too.
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  #43  
Old Posted Dec 30, 2011, 11:22 AM
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Thanks for looking. I always appreciate it.

Arkitekte -- I always try to tie the pictures together with good theme music. I'm glad you liked it.
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  #44  
Old Posted Dec 30, 2011, 4:59 PM
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great tour. i need to go back during work hours and go into the galleries next time. the area has come a long way since i first explored it in 2002 or so.

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  #45  
Old Posted Dec 30, 2011, 9:22 PM
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There ain't no small city finah
than Asheville, North Carolina!

More stuff...post more stuff!
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  #46  
Old Posted Dec 31, 2011, 12:26 AM
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More stuff...post more stuff!
All in good time... I keep waiting for snow so I can do my yearly snowy downtown thread, but with a La Nina winter... Anyway, thanks. And thanks to you too, LSyd.
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"To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end." -- Rebecca West for The New Yorker, 1947
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  #47  
Old Posted Jan 1, 2012, 5:04 AM
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Long Shadows on the Yellow Grass

I did not intend to go to Riverside Cemetery today. Rather, I'd planned to go and kill some time photographing a newly-built shopping district that has fast become the answer to downtown in my area of the city. However, when I stepped outside and saw how harsh the light was today, I considered that when photographing buildings you're all too often aiming the camera upward and often into the sun. I thought perhaps a better idea would be to go someplace where you would be aiming the camera down. And off I went to the graveyard.

Located in a Victorian neighborhood called Montford, Riverside is Asheville's largest cemetery, and the remains of more than 13,000 people are interred here. The graves tell so many stories. I saw a monument to a woman who had outlived at least three of her children. Their graves were next to hers. I saw entire rows of graves belonging to people who died in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, which hit Asheville especially hard; that must have been a terrifying time to live here and see the whole city around you sick and dying. I saw -- and photographed -- graves of people from other states and other countries, and wondered how they'd come to sleep beneath the ground here in Southern Appalachia, hundreds (sometimes thousands) of miles from their homes.

Shall we explore?

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First off, let's consider the irony that a big cemetery is located at the end of a dead-end street.













































Thomas Wolfe was one of the authors who helped put Asheville on the map. Others were short story writer O. Henry (aka William Sidney Porter), Carl Sandburg, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In recent years, authors such as Gail Godwin, Charles Frazier, and Ron Rash -- among many others -- have lived in or worked in Asheville.



There were a lot of people in the cemetery tending to graves, seeing the sights (including a couple of tourists who stopped me to ask where some of the more famous graves were located), mothers pushing strollers, joggers, and even what appeared to be couples out on dates. I can relate to that. My boyfriend and I came here on one of our first dates and went for a stroll.

What -- you don't go to cemeteries when you're out on a date?



















I'm going to guess that someone either threw something at this mausoleum, or slung paint on it that had to be scrubbed off. Vandalism seems to be a problem in Riverside, after a long and peaceful hiatus. I noticed quite a few gravestones toppled over, and they didn't get that way without help.

However, once upon a time, Montford -- the neighborhood where Riverside Cemetery is located -- was once an extremely bad neighborhood and thugs would regularly wander in to do some damage. The result nowadays is that most of the statues are missing their heads or limbs or, in the case of one, was broken off at the ankles and carted off altogether.







This was a bit strange. This gravestone was dedicated to two men with differing last names who had both died in the 1950's. I couldn't help but wonder if perhaps they had been a couple.









For a little Southern city in the Appalachian Mountains, Asheville's Jewish community has a long and proud history.









































































































There's a veterans' cemetery inside Riverside Cemetery. Most of the gravestones are marked with the state the veteran was from. If the veteran was foreign, the country is marked. There were several Austrians buried here, and people from most every state. This begs the question of why, and how they ended up here, of all places. Most of them died young and in the 1920's. If I recall my history, there wasn't much going on war-wise in the world in the 1920's, but I'm no expert.



















When I was a kid, my mother and I loved nothing more than to visit cemeteries and go off in search of gravestones that told how the person had died. And my mother wonders how I managed to grow up so morbid.



















Those are the tall buildings of downtown off in the distance. Back to the land of the living...



And in case you found this collection of pictures to be depressing, let me cheer you up with a picture of a cat sleeping on some Montford resident's front steps.



And also with a picture of a fat squirrel encountered in a tree in the cemetery.

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  #48  
Old Posted Jan 2, 2012, 3:41 PM
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Awesome photos as always! Thanks for posting!
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  #49  
Old Posted Jan 2, 2012, 11:35 PM
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Thanks!
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"To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end." -- Rebecca West for The New Yorker, 1947
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  #50  
Old Posted Jan 3, 2012, 1:58 AM
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i like the dance space graffiti, made me giggle.

good work all around.
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  #51  
Old Posted Jan 3, 2012, 4:33 AM
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The likely reason behind the different cities on the stones is homesickness. Though I'm in Atlanta, I still consider myself a western North Carolinian.

I've never been to Riverside. When I was a kid, Montford was the red light district. It was a place where residents could look out of their window and see drug deals or a place to find a cheap apartment. It's amazing how that area turned around. It took considerable effort to revitalize it over decades (dating back to the 1970s, if I remember correctly).
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  #52  
Old Posted Jan 3, 2012, 3:06 PM
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Thanks not only for looking, but for complimenting!

Matthew -- yeah, Montford's rebirth was decades in the making, and it's amazing that it survived as well as it did.
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"To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end." -- Rebecca West for The New Yorker, 1947
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  #53  
Old Posted Mar 7, 2012, 4:15 AM
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When you're in Asheville, you never forget that you are in the heart of the mountains -- not when three mountain ranges and two rivers converge in the city. However, Asheville is an old (by American standards) city, and even though it's small, it's most definitely a very urban sort of place. It's had time to settle itself and build itself up, and that can lead to a disconnection between your life in town and the nature that surrounds it.

This is why it's so important to get out of town now and again, and there are few places better than Asheville that offer such great opportunities to get out and enjoy the scenery so close to town and all its amenities.

Dupont State Forest is such a place. Just forty minutes away from my front door, here's a wonderland of waterfalls, trails, woods, lakes, and a river, all of it preserved by the state of North Carolina for the enjoyment of all. It almost wasn't that way, though. In fact, Dupont Forest almost became yet another gated community but public outrage over the developer's plans prompted the state to step in. The developer has since gone bankrupt thanks to the grinding Great Recession, and it could not have happened to a nicer guy. I hope he burns in hell.

But let us talk of more pleasant things. Welcome to Dupont State Forest.

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Dupont Forest is so named because the land belonged to the Dupont Corporation, originally. Dupont operated a facility, since leveled, at the heart of their property and when they pulled up stakes and departed, that was what opened the door for their property to become what it is today.



The Little River runs through Dupont Forest, giving rise to its most noteworthy attractions... six waterfalls.






This is Hooker Falls.











Every year -- and I do mean every year -- tourists die from falling off the waterfalls here and elsewhere in the region. We who live here don't know how to make it any plainer: respect the waterfalls. Respect them, look at them, enjoy them, love them, but do not do anything stupid in them or near them because they are as dangerous as they are beautiful. If you slip and fall, over the edge you will go. Hooker falls is perhaps the only one you would survive a fall over -- and if the water is especially high, not even then.









This plant is called "turkey paw." It's a traditional Southern Appalachian Christmas plant.



To acquire its property, the Dupont Corporation purchased dozens of farmsteads and homesteads. This meant that occasionally, someone's heritage got left behind. In the forest now and again you'll see a chimney to mark where a house once stood, and there is also a large fireplace and chimney still standing to mark the spot where there was once a large hotel. Also, deep in the forest a handful of cemeteries remain, remnants of the communities that once thrived here. This is Moore Cemetery.







































As beautiful as it is, something terrible is going on in Dupont Forest, as well as all across Western North Carolina. Our trees are dying -- particularly the hemlocks that provide so much shade to mountain streams. This kind of thing has happened before, with the chestnut blight that wiped out the "redwoods of the East," and it took decades for other trees to take the chestnut's place. It will take decades for something to replace the hemlocks and in the meantime the ecosystem will be thrown into turmoil. Throughout the forest, you'll see the ghosts of the hemlocks.













Triple Falls.



Would you care to guess how many steps there are to take you down from the trail to the falls themselves? 101. I counted.

















For a little perspective, note the size of the people there -- including that lady with her baby -- against the waterfall behind them.





Here's the river above Triple Falls. Deceptively calm and peaceful... and yet another reason to remember to respect the mountains should you find yourself out in them.











High Falls.





Oh yes, I forgot to mention there are two parts to High Falls. Silly me.







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"To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end." -- Rebecca West for The New Yorker, 1947
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  #54  
Old Posted Mar 7, 2012, 4:57 AM
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It's good to see other parts of the area on the forum.

The tree problems are due to an insect brought into the country, I think from Asia? I know they are researching new hybrid "replacement" trees that are resistant to them, with test trees currently planted.
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  #55  
Old Posted Mar 7, 2012, 5:12 AM
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Quote:
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It's good to see other parts of the area on the forum.

The tree problems are due to an insect brought into the country, I think from Asia? I know they are researching new hybrid "replacement" trees that are resistant to them, with test trees currently planted.
You're thinking of the hemlock wooly adelgid, and next up will be the emerald ash borer, which has already been reported in Virginia. And while we wait for that, we're also dealing with bugs and fungi that are attacking the oaks, dogwoods, the locust trees. It's horrifying, to be quite honest.
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"To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end." -- Rebecca West for The New Yorker, 1947
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  #56  
Old Posted Mar 7, 2012, 12:44 PM
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Shame about the gravestone vandalism it happens the world over I am afraid . Asheville and the surrounding area looks lovely.
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  #57  
Old Posted Mar 7, 2012, 9:43 PM
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Beautiful waterfalls- I'll remember this place if I ever happen to be in the area.
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  #58  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2012, 4:35 PM
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great update. and cemeteries are great places.

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  #59  
Old Posted Mar 19, 2012, 2:14 AM
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As far as small cities with character, it's hard to beat Asheville pound for pound. I'd love to visit someday.
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  #60  
Old Posted Mar 20, 2012, 12:43 AM
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Thanks for your comments, everyone!
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