Qualla: Wilma Dykeman RiverWay Plan

Wilma Dykeman RiverWay Plan: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Wilma Dykeman published *The French Broad* in 1955. It was a love letter to a river and an angry inventory of what was being done to it - pulp mill discharge, mining runoff, raw sewage from the towns along its banks. "Who killed the French Broad?" she asked. The book landed almost twenty years before the Clean Water Act, and it took another generation for Asheville to seriously start cleaning up the mess Dykeman had described. The seventeen-mile greenway system that now carries her name is, in a way, the answer she was waiting for.

Wilma Dykeman RiverWay Plan: Wilma Dykeman's River

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Wilma Dykeman RiverWay Plan: RiverLink and the 1989 Vision

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 - ...

Wilma Dykeman RiverWay Plan: Carrier Park and an Old Speedway

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Ashevil...

Wilma Dykeman RiverWay Plan: French Broad River Park and Greenway

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Wilma Dykeman RiverWay Plan: An Answer That's Still Being Written

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...