With the Citizen-Times Book Circle, we are taking a second look at what could be considered the essential texts of Western North Carolina, the fiction and nonfiction that tells us who we are, what our place is, how we got here and hopefully where we are going.
Wilma Dykeman’s “The French Broad,” published 60 years ago, joins the first rank of books on our shelf.
Dan Pierce, a history professor at UNC Asheville, and a fine writer in his own right, jokingly puts it this way: “Any local who hasn’t read ‘The French Broad’ should have his or her driver’s license revoked.”
Before you are a citizen of the world, you have to understand your particular place in the world, your little corner of earth you would call home.
And Dykeman offers a quick, readable, yet comprehensive guide to the history of the French Broad River, the world’s third oldest waterway after the Nile River and the New also in North Carolina. The northbound French Broad has its headwaters under the Devil’s Courthouse in Transylvania County and flows north through Asheville, Marshall, over into Tennessee, then bends back south from Newport to Knoxville, joining with the Tennessee River.
That life-giving artery provided the first route into the remote wilderness. Trading paths, turnpikes, railroads and highways have followed natural route, and Dykeman chronicled them all for the past 200 years.
“She was a very good historian and an incredible storyteller,” Pierce said. “It’s an essential book for our region, providing the context for where we are today. There’s not many books that hold up so well after 60 years. That’s because of the perspective she brings to it with a deep love for the area and a love for the people that comes through.”
Now we are at another crossroads with the French Broad, once fouled with industrial pollution. Dykeman was a pioneering environmentalist, pointing out in the 1950s the terrible costs of fouled water.
Without that water, we wouldn’t have a thriving craft beer industry gaining a foothold here in the Asheville area, nor would we be talking about $50 million in taxpayer money going into new roads and greenways, let alone the $200 million in private investment.
It’s fitting that the network of walkways, bike paths and corridors will bear the name of the Wilma Dykeman Riverway.
Before her death in 2006, Dykeman had seen her beloved river resurrected. She witnessed the downtown where she once worked at the Kress’s five and dime restored as a bustling tourism destination.
Success comes with new challenges, and many in Asheville worry about a tourism-based economy and how it helps the locals. Reading “The French Broad,” you understand this is an age-old tension in town.
Dykeman describes the granddaddy of Asheville’s resort hotels – the Battery Park, built in 1886 on a hill 125 feet above Asheville’s public square and surrounded by a 25-acre park. (No Pit of Despair back then. The hotel came with its own private greenspace.)
“The Battery Park was lending reality to an attitude that was growing throughout the region; The Chamber-of-Commerce, come-hither tone that was to make the mountains of Western North Carolina a paradox of tourists and isolated mountain folks.”
Dykeman wasn’t afraid to write a chapter calling everyone to task and a community to action in “Who Killed the French Broad?” She would certainly caution us against unwittingly writing a chapter in the near future “Who Killed Asheville?”
Dykeman offered a warning 60 years ago that still applies: “Dwellers of the French Broad country are learning an ancient lesson in all their natural resources; it is easy to destroy overnight treasures that cannot be replaced in a generation, easy to destroy in a generation what cannot be restored in centuries.”
Book Circle
The Asheville Citizen-Times Book Circle is reading Wilma Dykeman’s “The French Broad.”
Follow the discussion and post your favorite passages at our Facebook Page www.facebook.com/AshevilleBookClub
Join us for a discussion 5:30-7 p.m. Nov. 5 in the boardroom of the Lenoir-Rhyne Graduate Center at the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce, 36 Montford Ave. Plenty of free parking.
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