Dykeman was born in Asheville in 1920, daughter of a North Carolina farmer-mother and a New York-born father who had moved south for his health. She wrote eighteen books across her career - novels, biographies, regional histories, and the unforgettable *The French Broad*, part of the Rivers of America series. She was an early voice for civil rights as well as environmental protection; her 1962 novel *The Tall Woman* drew on Appalachian women's history at a time when most American fiction ignored the region entirely. By the time RiverLink began its restoration work in the late 1980s, Dykeman was already the obvious patron saint of the effort. Naming the plan for her, after her death in 2006, made the connection explicit.

The nonprofit RiverLink formed in 1987 with a deceptively simple goal: reclaim Asheville's riverfront. The 1989 Asheville Riverfront Plan, which won an American Planning Association award and was the immediate predecessor to the current RiverWay Plan, identified what was wrong - decades of industrial dumping, abandoned warehouses, polluted runoff, sewage outfalls - and what could be right. A seventeen-mile greenway corridor along the French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers. Parks where there were brownfields. Trails where there were barbed-wire fences. Public access where for a century there had only been factory backs. The plan represented over twenty years of accumulated community thinking, and it became the template for everything that followed.

The breakthrough came in 1999. The old Asheville-Weaverville Speedway on Amboy Road - a half-mile asphalt oval that had been quiet since the 1960s - went up for sale. RiverLink raised $1.6 million, bought it, attached a conservation easement, and donated it to the City of Asheville. City crews resurfaced the racetrack. It became a cycling track and pedestrian loop. They built a wetland and stormwater education center on adjacent land. They added basketball courts, bocce alleys, volleyball, an in-line skating rink, ball fields. A thousand volunteers built a playground in five days. The fifty-acre park reopened as Carrier Park and became, almost overnight, one of the most-used parks in western North Carolina.

The first piece of the puzzle came earlier, in 1991, when Carolina Power & Light donated a two-mile-long strip of riverfront. The land had been an unofficial dump site for construction companies for years - poison ivy, dumped concrete, scrap. RiverLink saw a park. They cleaned it up, built trails, and partnered with the City of Asheville to manage it. Phase two added a dog park and wildflower garden in September 1995. Phase three, funded by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission in 1999, extended the trail along Amboy Road and added a handicapped-accessible fishing pier. As of the most recent count, Asheville's greenway system runs 4.5 contiguous miles - a foundation for the seventeen miles the full RiverWay envisions.

The Wilma Dykeman RiverWay isn't finished. It probably never will be in any final sense - more parcels come up, more trails get connected, more sections of the French Broad get the kind of attention Dykeman demanded seventy years ago. The plan integrates economic development with environmental restoration: greenways pull foot traffic, restored riverfronts pull businesses, riverside parks pull people back to a part of the city they'd been turning their backs on for a hundred years. The River Arts District, blooming downstream in the old industrial corridor, exists because the river itself became something worth being near again. That was Dykeman's argument, and Asheville is still proving it right.