Smith arrived in Asheville in 1889 as the supervising architect for the Biltmore Estate - George Washington Vanderbilt II's 250-room chateau, then under construction in the country south of town. When the main work on Biltmore wound down, Smith opened his own practice in Asheville and began designing the buildings that gave the city's downtown its early-twentieth-century character. He was already a Freemason himself, and when the local lodges decided to consolidate their meeting spaces into a single Masonic Temple, he was the natural choice. The Temple Company accepted the finished building from the contractor on April 29, 1915. The original plans, deeds, and survey plats remain in the Temple's records.

Four stories of pressed brick, trimmed with limestone and grey brick on a granite foundation, topped with a red-tile hipped roof. The Broadway facade carries a two-story portico fronted by paired Ionic columns, an unusual classical flourish on what is otherwise a restrained Edwardian commercial building. Smith balanced ceremonial gravity with city-block utility: the upper floors hold the lodge rooms designed for ritual work, while the ground level was rentable commercial space. The Temple is a contributing structure to the Downtown Asheville Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Mount Hermon No. 118 chartered before the Civil War and has met continuously since. Vance was its most famous initiate, but he was hardly alone. Robert Brank Vance - Zebulon's older brother - served as Master of Mount Hermon in 1866, 1867, and 1873, and as Grand Master of Masons of North Carolina in 1868 and 1869. The Vance brothers shaped North Carolina politics in the second half of the nineteenth century in ways that historians are still re-evaluating, particularly regarding Zebulon Vance's role in Confederate politics and his later opposition to Reconstruction. The Masonic record sits alongside the political one, neither erasing the other.

Norburn Creighton Hyatt was Master of Mount Hermon No. 118 in 1969 and became Grand Master of Masons of North Carolina in 1985 - a century and a third after Vance's petition. The Lodge's continuity through that span is unusual. Many American Masonic lodges declined sharply after World War II as membership aged and younger generations did not replace them. Mount Hermon has held on. The Asheville Temple continues to host meetings, ceremonies, and the kind of quiet civic work that Freemasonry has done in American towns for centuries - mostly invisible from the street, deliberately so.

The Temple stands on Broadway in downtown Asheville, two blocks north of Pack Square, in a stretch of buildings that range from Smith's commercial work to Douglas Ellington's Art Deco churches and city hall. The Broadway facade with its Ionic portico catches morning light. Most visitors who walk past never realize what is inside. The Temple is a working lodge; it is not generally open to tourists. But the building itself is part of the architectural ensemble that makes downtown Asheville a National Register district. Smith's exterior is the public face of a private institution - exactly what a Masonic temple is supposed to be.