Asheville Collection

Dive into the world of small-town love with this collection of standalone rom-com stories featuring friends and neighbors in Asheville, North Carolina. Each story has a tie-in to Sylvie's brand-new Love on Tap series, so you'll enjoy seeing these characters make special appearances throughout that series. Playing by Heart: Kat and Grady - Music lover Kat has spent a lifetime hiding in the shadows. When her hot guitar-playing crush needs a songstress to save his show, can he convince her to give life under the spotlight a try? The Switch Up: Daphne and Wyatt - Daphne has everything under control—including her dating life. Having found her perfect match through a carefully calculated process, there’s only one thing left to do: meet him. What could possibly go wrong? Booby Trapped: Rylee and Dean - Today is the day for Dean to finally tell his sister's best friend how he feels about her. Too bad she’s got him running around town on a mad charity scavenger hunt and looking like a complete fool. He'll never win Rylee's heart this way, will he? Crushing on Casanova: Mel and Will - When life gives you lemons, you… work at your aunt’s escort business? Scheduling dates and fielding phone calls from horny customers may not be Melanie’s dream, but the job does have its perks. A sweet hottie named Will, in particular. But she could never date an escort… right? Taunted: Jade and Pete - Jade is a tough-as-nails chick with a plan, and she’ll do whatever it takes to secure her future. But someone—or something— seems hell-bent on interrupting her life in the most unnerving of ways.

Since December 1885, the wrought iron gates of Riverside Cemetery have welcomed both mourners and visitors alike. The garden-style cemetery overlooking the French Broad River is the final resting place of great American authors Thomas Wolfe and O. Henry, Civil War heroes, colorful politicians, and acclaimed artists and craftsmen. Around every bend of Riverside's winding roads, a new story is waiting to be told, from a deadly shoot-out in Pack Square, the sad ending of 18 German sailors who were prisoners during World War I, to a United States senator with a connection to the Hope Diamond fortune--and its curse. Asheville's Riverside Cemetery illustrates the history of the cemetery and the notable figures who rest within, telling their stories and giving glimpses of what one could hear if stones could talk.

Albemarle Park was envisioned as a picturesque mountainside resort in north Asheville. It was a great success due to the collaborative efforts of railroad executive William Greene Raoul and his son Thomas; Bradford Gilbert, architect of New York City's first skyscraper; and Samuel Parsons Jr., landscape architect for the City of New York. The Manor and its surrounding cottages served as an alternative to standard late-19th-century Asheville hotels and boardinghouses. Dances, plays, bowling, archery, golf, motoring, and equestrian events were available for guests to enjoy, and meals were sourced from The Manor's own farm. Notable guests of The Manor included Eleanor Roosevelt and Grace Kelly. It was also a film set for The Last of the Mohicans. Consisting of enchanting architecture and romantic landscaping, Albemarle Park was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1977 and as a local historic district in 1989. Through family archives, private collections, and ephemera, Asheville's Albemarle Park showcases the history of this significant Asheville neighborhood.

Although African Americans make up a small portion of the population of western North Carolina, they have contributed much to the area's physical and cultural landscape. This enlightening study surveys the region's segregated black schools from Reconstruction through integration and reveals the struggles, achievements, and ultimate victory of a unified community intent on achieving an adequate education for its children. The book documents the events that initially brought blacks into Appalachia, early efforts to educate black children, the movement to acquire and improve schools, and the long process of desegregation. Personnel issues, curriculum, extracurricular activities, sports, consolidation, and construction also receive attention. Featuring commentary from former students, teachers and parents, this work weighs the value and achievement of rural segregated black schools as well as their significance for educators today.

A Southern Collection presents select masterworks from the permanent collection of the Morris Museum of Art on the occasion of the institution's inaugural exhibition. Drawn from a comprehensive survey collection of painting in the South from the late eighteenth century to the present day, the museum's opening exhibit explores an artistic terrain as rich and diverse as the South itself, arranged in categories that reflect critical chronological developments in the art world. A survey of painting activity in the South begins with the travels of itinerant portrait artists working prior to the Civil War. At the same time, landscape painting encompasses a sensitive response to the swamps, bayous and fertile fields of the South. Late in the nineteenth century strong and vivid genre painting competes with the nostalgic effects realized by Southern impressionists, whose shimmering, liquid images are invested with an elusive spirit of place. In this century, those strains of realism and naturalism that characterize the classic body of Southern writing appear in the representational art of painters who defied the modern abstract dictum. And finally, the exciting, compelling works of a current generation of both self-taught artists and sophisticated contemporary painters complete this fascinating, though sometimes neglected, chapter in American art history.