Participation Type
Paper
Session Title
Session 5.08 History
Presentation #1 Title
This Was Our Valley: Mapping Historic Structures in Asheville's Watershed
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
On a mild mid-March day in 1903, the North Fork Watershed’s first warden, Will Burnett, turned a cast iron valve to open the pipe that would send the first trickle of drinking water from Black Mountain into Asheville. This water—some of the purest in the United States—would later flood the vacant school, church, and homesteads built by Burnett’s family and friends. Will Burnett became one of the first wardens to patrol the newly formed reservoir when the city condemned and purchased a portion of the land (a little under 5,000 acres) that makes up the present day 18,000-acre property. Over the next four decades, Will and his brothers were allowed to live near their home place, but under the charge that they would keep the North Fork Valley’s native families—including their own—off their ancestral land, even though the reservoir would not be built for over 50 years. More than a century later, in the spring of 2012, staff and volunteers from Buncombe County’s primary museum of general local history, the Swannanoa Valley Museum, hiked through the Watershed property to identify and catalogue many of the abandoned historic properties. An effort is now underway by Museum staff to map the locations and the historic data (photographs, oral histories, and documents) gathered during the four-month study using a beta version of UNC’s new digital humanities software. The finished map project will be used to examine land use issues in western North Carolina.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Anne Chesky Smith graduated with an MA in Appalachian Studies from Appalachian State University in 2010. She is the executive director at the Swannanoa Valley Museum in Black Mountain, NC.
This Was Our Valley: Mapping Historic Structures in Asheville's Watershed
Harris Hall 130
On a mild mid-March day in 1903, the North Fork Watershed’s first warden, Will Burnett, turned a cast iron valve to open the pipe that would send the first trickle of drinking water from Black Mountain into Asheville. This water—some of the purest in the United States—would later flood the vacant school, church, and homesteads built by Burnett’s family and friends. Will Burnett became one of the first wardens to patrol the newly formed reservoir when the city condemned and purchased a portion of the land (a little under 5,000 acres) that makes up the present day 18,000-acre property. Over the next four decades, Will and his brothers were allowed to live near their home place, but under the charge that they would keep the North Fork Valley’s native families—including their own—off their ancestral land, even though the reservoir would not be built for over 50 years. More than a century later, in the spring of 2012, staff and volunteers from Buncombe County’s primary museum of general local history, the Swannanoa Valley Museum, hiked through the Watershed property to identify and catalogue many of the abandoned historic properties. An effort is now underway by Museum staff to map the locations and the historic data (photographs, oral histories, and documents) gathered during the four-month study using a beta version of UNC’s new digital humanities software. The finished map project will be used to examine land use issues in western North Carolina.
