Asheville: From Bunkum Country to the Mountain Metropolis

The word bunkum, meaning empty political talk, the forerunner of the American slang bunk, was born in this county. Felix Walker, who represented the Buncombe County district in Congress in eighteen twenty, gave a long and notoriously pointless floor speech and explained to his exasperated colleagues that he was not speaking to them; he was speaking, he said, for Buncombe. The county's name became synonymous with windy nonsense, and the usage spread across the English-speaking world. That is one legacy of Buncombe County.

The other legacy is Asheville, the city at its center, and the story of how quickly the mountains transformed from a barrier into a destination.

Buncombe County was organized in seventeen ninety-one from parts of Burke and Rutherford counties, named for Colonel Edward Buncombe, a Revolutionary War officer who died of wounds suffered at Germantown. The first European settlers had been filtering into these coves and hollows through the seventeen eighties, mostly Scots-Irish and German families moving up the ridge systems from the Carolina Piedmont. Asheville was established as the county seat in seventeen ninety-seven, named for Governor Samuel Ashe.

For its first century, Buncombe County was known as the State of Buncombe, it was so large and so mountainous that it felt like its own territory. The French Broad River gave access, the ridges provided timber, and by the eighteen eighties the railroad arrived and everything changed.

The Southern Railway and the Western North Carolina Railroad transformed Asheville from an isolated county seat into a resort destination. By nineteen seventeen it had become fashionable enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald brought his wife Zelda here seeking treatment at a mountain sanitarium. Thomas Wolfe, who was born here, used its streets and its citizens as raw material for the novel he could not sell for years, a sprawling autobiographical epic eventually published as Look Homeward, Angel. The city that called itself too weird for words had been called too weird, in its earlier incarnation, for the rest of North Carolina.