Montford's full development began in 1889, the same year George Vanderbilt started buying up land south of town for the estate that would become Biltmore. Asheville was riding a wave of railroad money and tuberculosis tourists, and the neighborhood reflected that prosperity. The dominant style was Queen Anne - corner turrets, irregular massing, gables stacked on gables - but Montford's builders were unusually well-read for a Southern mountain town. They knew the work of Bruce Price, Bernard Maybeck, even Frank Lloyd Wright, and they borrowed freely. The oldest house in the district predates the boom: the Rankin House at 192 Elizabeth Street, a Greek Revival residence built around 1846 with Italianate flourishes added later, a survivor from before the railroad changed everything.

When Richard Sharp Smith arrived from England to supervise construction of the Biltmore House, he had no intention of staying. But Asheville's building boom convinced him to open a private practice, and his fingerprints are scattered through Montford. He liked gambrel roofs and hipped gables, pebbledash and stucco walls, heavy porch brackets, simple Colonial Revival details. The result was a neighborhood that looked nothing like the rest of the state - shingled, earth-toned, informally composed. The Shingle style houses are particularly numerous here, reflecting both the wealth of the original buyers and the presence of architects who knew what the East Coast tastemakers were doing. By the 1920s a sub-division called Montford Hills extended the same vocabulary into a new generation of homes.

Dr. Carroll opened his sanitorium in Montford in 1909, renamed it Highland Hospital in 1912, and gave it to Duke University's Neuropsychiatric Department in 1939. The institution treated mental illness with what was, for its time, a relatively humane approach - exercise, music, work therapy. Zelda Fitzgerald was a patient there in 1948. On the night of March 10, a fire broke out in the central building and spread quickly through the wooden structure. Zelda and eight other women died in the blaze. She was 47. The building Carroll once lived in - the one where Nina Simone's piano lessons happened - still stands as Highland Hall, a stop on the Asheville Historic Trolley Tours.

On a wooded ridge at Montford's western edge, the Asheville Cemetery Company laid out Riverside Cemetery in 1885, partly as a burial ground and partly as a public park - a Victorian idea that had become fashionable in northern cities. Thirteen thousand people are buried there now. Thomas Wolfe, the novelist who turned Asheville into Altamont in *Look Homeward, Angel*, lies a short walk from O. Henry, who chose the city as his final resting place though he'd lived there only briefly. Zebulon Vance, the Confederate-era governor whose monument downtown was dismantled by court order in 2021, is buried here with his two wives. So is his mother Mira, a farmer and slaveholder. So is Lillian Exum Clement, the first woman elected to the North Carolina legislature. And so is George Masa, the Japanese-born photographer whose images of the Blue Ridge Mountains helped persuade Congress to create Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The cemetery holds the whole tangled history of western North Carolina in one shaded hillside.

Montford was designated a National Register historic district in 1977 and a local historic district by the City of Asheville in 1981. The B&Bs came next - dozens of them, occupying the larger Victorians along Montford Avenue, Pearson Drive, and Cumberland Circle. The neighborhood is still residential, still walkable, still surprising at every corner. The Lion & The Rose, the Black Walnut, the Ambassador Apartments - addresses that read like an inventory of a different America. Just south, downtown Asheville continues to reinvent itself. Up here, the streets have looked more or less the same for a hundred and twenty years.