Qualla: Montford Area Historic District

Montford Area Historic District: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren LeMay from Cincinnati, OH, United States, CC0. Nina Simone once practiced piano in a Montford parlor. The teacher was the wife of Dr. Robert S. Carroll, who ran the psychiatric hospital up the street, and the young Eunice Waymon - not yet renamed for the stage - was studying the music that would eventually carry her out of Tryon and around the world. That parlor still stands. So does most of the neighborhood that surrounded it: a half-square-mile suburb just north of downtown Asheville where the architecture of an entire turn-of-the-century moment was somehow preserved more or less intact.

Image: Warren LeMay from Cincinnati, OH, United States | CC0

Montford Area Historic District: A Suburb Built on a Boom

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren LeMay from Cincinnati, OH, United States, CC0. 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 ...

Image: Warren LeMay from Cincinnati, OH, United States | CC0

Montford Area Historic District: The Architect from Biltmore

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Upstateherd, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 h...

Image: Upstateherd | CC BY-SA 4.0

Montford Area Historic District: Highland Hospital and a Fire in 1948

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karen D. Hoffman, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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, w...

Image: Karen D. Hoffman | CC BY-SA 3.0

Montford Area Historic District: Riverside Cemetery, 87 Acres of Stories

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Upstateherd, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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...

Image: Upstateherd | CC BY-SA 4.0

Montford Area Historic District: Living Neighborhood

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karen D. Hoffman, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

Image: Karen D. Hoffman | CC BY-SA 3.0