Arts Council of Henderson County

Hiding In Plain Sight in Hendersonville Arts Council of Henderson County

Welcome to the Hendersonville street grid. It is essentially unchanged since it was laid out in 1847. The town started as the judicial center for Henderson County that was cleaved from Buncombe County in 1838. To the extent that it grew at all in its early days it was as a stopping point on the Buncombe Turnpike that had been carved through the Blue Ridge Mountains from South Carolina to Tennessee in 1827. Main Street where we are standing was part of the Turnpike. The railroad arrived in 1879 and Hendersonville morphed into an agricultural market. Still, by the year 1900 this was only a town of some 1,000 people. What you would have seen looking down Main Street were wooden houses, wooden inns, some commercial brick buildings and plenty of trees and open space. Hendersonville was just beginning to develop as a middle class resort, however. Within the next decade the population tripled, houses moved off of Main Street and the commercial district solidified. By 1929 the wooden buildings were torn down and replaced with mostly two-story brick structures, completely infilled for six blocks. Today you will see one of the most intact early 20th century main streets in western North Carolina. In addition to a Saunter down Main Street this book contains a walk through the town's historic West End. From the time Hendersonville was founded in the 1840s through the early 20th century Main Street was the primary commercial and residential district. In that time there were barely 1,000 residents. The town grew rapidly after 1910 and Main Street filled with businesses. Many of the displaced homeowners built new houses on the West Side. Until post World War II lots were divided and built on and today 244 structures are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The West Side, containing 111 acres, is Hendersonville's largest historic district. For the most part the West Side extended the street grid created for the city. The lots were often divided neatly into building sites 50 to 100 feet wide. Corner lots were spacious - 400 feet wide by 200 feet deep and many remain large today. No two houses in the west Side look alike. They were created by local builders, some no doubt guided by architectural pattern books. Some were architect-designed. As the West Side neighborhood pushes into its second century, many of its houses would still be recognizable to their original owners. Finally, there is a walking tour of Connemara, known famously as the final home of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Carl Sandburg but has a richer, less-known history that dates back to the days when Flat Rock, North Carolina was known throughout the South as "the Charleston of the Mountains."