This 1920 view of Fairview Road was taken by Asheville photographer William Barnhill and is thought to be looking towards Cedar Mountain. The other, taken 80 years later by Simon Gurdal, shows the progress of travel among our mountain communities.

Even though Fairview Road generally followed the same route that 74A does today, given that it was a dirt road, one could probably only travel at about ten miles per hour. If you stopped for a picnic lunch or had a flat tire, the 26-mile trip from Asheville to Chimney Rock in 1920 probably took three to four hours.

In the biographical book Thomas Wolfe and His Family (1961), Thomas Wolfe’s sister Mabel Wolfe Wheaton wrote about her road trip to Chimney Rock in 1916. “For one thing,” she said, “in those days, motorists were always fearful that their carbide headlights wouldn’t function; there was little night traveling. Besides, the highways then, compared with the present concrete and asphalt ribbons that cross and crisscross North Carolina and the nation in every direction, were little more than sand clay trails few and far between.”

“Model T Fords of the era relied on gravity to feed fuel to the carburetor” rather than a fuel pump, meaning that it could not climb a steep hill when the fuel was low. The problem would seem a significant one in Western North Carolina, and especially trying on a trip to Chimney Rock. Apparently, the immediate solution to this problem was “to climb steep hills in reverse,” and it makes one wonder if this was a common occurrence here. (source: Ford Model T, Wikipedia.)

Buncombe County had 132 miles of paved highways in 1920, and the county and the Good Roads Association were constantly paving more roads and working to keep the macadam and sand clay hard-surfaced roads in good repair.

For more information, contact the NC Special Collections Desk at 828.250.4740 or write nc.reference@buncombecounty.org.