Well, here we are. This is Hendersonville, the smaller and uglier half of the Asheville-Hendersonville metro area. This is also the seat of the county where I was born and where I lived until I was 27, when I couldn't stand the place anymore and moved 20 miles north and a world away. The difference between Asheville and Hendersonville really could not be more of a gulf.
Why, you ask. To sum it up, Hendersonville is a detestable little retirement town and to go much farther than that would take a ridiculous amount of time on both your part and mine. If you want just a bit more explanation though, it is suffice to say that in Henderson County, you are neither valued nor welcomed unless you are rich, white, old, and unless your politics caper just a step to the right of
Birth of a Nation. In Asheville, meanwhile, as one entrepreneur found out to his dismay, openly proclaiming your Republican sensibilities can be the kiss of death for your business. People will avoid your coffee shop and it will fail. The
Asheville Citizen-Times receives a handful of letters every year from tourists up from conservative areas who were appalled --
appalled! -- by the goings-on they encountered downtown. Women held hands and men were kissing! The rainbow flag few and rainbow stickers leered at them from shop windows! There were witches dancing around a magnolia tree near City Hall! A man dressed as a nun was patrolling the streets on a two-story bicycle!
They'll pray for us, they say, but they won't be back. This is fine, because there's always Hendersonville just down the road to bow and scrape for them as it works to encourage them to buy a house. Henderson County, you see, makes the vast majority of its fortune turning tourists into residents at the expense of all the natural beauty that used to draw the tourists in the first place. The place is a sprawling hellhole--
You see? I told you that if I got going, I'd just go berserk. Let's just say that Hendersonville is a hemorrhoid on the asshole of hell and be done with it.
But I will say this though: if you work at it, Hendersonville photographs well. It was a decent way to spend a couple of hours before joining my father (have prosthetic legs and cane, will travel) for lunch after his dialysis treatment.
Henderson County was formed in 1838 and named for North Carolina Supreme Court justice Leonard Henderson. Hendersonville was founded ten years later to serve as the county seat.
Being the county seat, of course, means that you get the courthouse, and the Historic Henderson County Courthouse (always said so that one can hear the capital letters) is Henderson County's historic pride and joy. It was built in 1904.
The majority of Henderson County's population is from elsewhere, usually by way of Florida, where they originally moved, got sick of the weather, and came north to the first place they could find that had seasons. These people now spend their time complaining about taxes and voting not to fund the schools. When the county wanted to renovate the courthouse, they didn't want to fund that either, and many were the letters to the Hendersonville paper advocating tearing it down so as not to have to spend tax dollars fixing it. Low taxes are the zenith and purpose of life, after all. A few letters demanding this building come down however, were charitable enough to say that perhaps the dome ought to be saved, maybe made into a gazebo in a little park. Provided, of course, that the park be paid for with donations and not with tax money.
Hendersonville is enormously proud of its Historic Downtown, which consists of five blocks of a single street, surrounded by a moat of suburban-style development. To the west there are some nice historic neighborhoods, while to the north, east, and south is more sprawl, roughly four square miles in total. In comparison to the nasty suburban mess that is the rest of the city, Historic Downtown Hendersonville is not unlike a diamond chip in a pile of dog shit.
This used to be a real pharmacy. Now, like most businesses downtown, it's a tourist trap. The locals don't go downtown except perhaps to eat at a restaurant. Downtown is for the tourists. The locals stay in the sprawl, where they can buy things one might actually need or want, and where one will not have to pay double or triple a normal price for it. Increasingly, though, even the tourist traps are being supplanted by real estate offices which are perhaps the only business more useless.
Downtown businesses come in a few varieties: antique stores, gift shops, art galleries, restaurants, professional offices, and real estate offices that usually represent individual subdivisions where the houses cost more than you will ever personally make in a lifetime. Plus a sprinkling of miscellaneous, such as one shop that sells pianos.
Surprisingly enough, it actually
is fine Japanese dining. This is one of three Hendersonville restaurants that have a good reputation even in Asheville, which is an unbelievable snob about just about anything beyond its city limits.
Really, would it be a hauntedhead thread without a squirrel?
One thing that Hendersonville does, and does well, is alleys.
Fun fact: though this building now houses a jewelry store, it was once home to the Queen Theater. When I was little, my mom took me here once and we asked the manager if he would show us what might remain of the old theater. He took us in the back and we saw that the stage remained, as did the balcony, which was where the black people sat, as they were not allowed anywhere else. In addition to that, there were several generations of fossilized chewing gum blackening the floor.
For the past couple of years, Hendersonville has been in with the in crowd of cities that choose to litter their streets with fiberglass whatsits and doodads. The first two years were bears, the third goats (to honor poet Carl Sandberg's goat farm at his estate just outside town in the posh village of Flat Rock), and this year it was apples. While goats can still be found at Sandberg's Connemara, apples and bears are no longer found in any great quantity in Henderson County thanks to relentless suburban sprawl. Remember, everyone -- there's no better way to enjoy the indescribable natural beauty of Western North Carolina than to raze an acre of it and build yourself a house. It's the Henderson County way!
This iron apple tree honors the many thousands of acres of orchards that have fallen to make way for golf course subdivisions.
In a pinch, if you squint, it can also honor the tens of thousands of acres of forest land that have also fallen to make way for golf course subdivisions. Henderson County loses, on average, a thousand acres of land to suburban sprawl each and every year. Just about all of this growth comes from retirees moving up from Florida, plus those from the Midwest and Northeast who have decided to cut out the middleman and move here without ever bothering with Florida at all. Henderson County's death rate far exceeds its birthrate, but the population has almost tripled in the 29 years that I have been alive. You do the math.
Goodbye from Retirement Town, USA, and good riddance to Retirement Town, USA from what
Rolling Stone once called "the freak capital of America."
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(<- official emoticon of Hendersonville.) This reminds me of the fair and state apple festival. Both happen in September and this brings back good memories. 
In Henderson County there isn't much to do and at West Henderson (go Falcons!), everyone looked forward to the fair and knew the dates. 
About ten years ago, the hammers and truck noises from "Cheap Sprawl - Vinyl Siding, Pool, Clubhouse, Golf - High 700's" became an alarm clock. The sounds echo off the mountains for several miles. And in the past, you would hear the sounds of the forest. 
Did you know: A 16-storey skyscraper was under construction in Hendersonville in 1926. It was the Fleetwood Hotel, but the hotel was never completed. In 1936, it was demolished. One of the saddest stories in the city's past. I'm guessing the hotel would stand today as a mountain-top condo building, if it was completed. Outsiders visiting and investing in Hendersonville is nothing new. I do wish this building was completed though. It was so close to completion, before it was abandoned and demolished.
Thank you for posting Hendersonville photos!
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